Five Minutes Past Midnight (Quadrangle - PG)
Title: Five Minutes Past Midnight
Rating: PG
Pairing: Mark/Addison, Mark/Derek/Addison, Derek/Addison, Derek/Meredith
Word Count: 2,452
Summary: Mark and Addison go on a post-apocalyptic road trip across the country to find their friend. Honest - this is not crack!fic.
Note: I have the apocalypse on the brain lately. I don’t know why; please forgive me for ending the world in this fic.
She was in New York when it happened.
Technically, she was in an abortion clinic in New York when it happened, but she tries not to think too much about that. She left when the muted CNN Headline News was suddenly interrupted by Wolf Blitzer and the closed-captioning mentioned something about a virus running rampant. She said a few words to the receptionist about being a doctor and her services needed elsewhere for the moment and she’d be back.
She wasn’t.
She went back to the hospital, was handed an awkward bright yellow quarantine suit and pulled her hair into a ponytail and went to work.
The best they could do was treat symptoms. They consulted with the CDC, the Air Force, hospitals and governments around the world. Nobody knew what it was or what happened. She didn’t sleep for a week, and neither did anyone she worked with, but in the end, it was too fast. The virus (they determined at least that much) killed too quickly for them to develop a vaccine. The concept of natural immunity was argued around day three, but at some point it was mentioned that most of the people still alive were either in biohazard suits, locked up in their apartments breathing recycled air, or actively dying so finding anyone with natural immunity was going to be difficult. It didn’t matter anyway.
Once it was over, and the air had been scanned and it was determined that they could ditch the hazmat suits, she told him about the baby. He mostly looked tired and said he needed a shower. They curled up together in the bottom bunk of an on call room, another couple already asleep on the top bunk, and slept. They sat in the cafeteria the next morning, surrounded by their coworkers as a few interns with kitchen skills served up better-than-usual eggs, hash browns and pancakes, and debated what had happened.
Mark thought it was aliens.
Addison thought it was an unusual strain of a tropical water-borne illness.
The female half of the couple they shared the bunk with asked why, if it was that, none of it looked familiar.
The male half thought the alien idea was stupid, too, but brushed past it and mulled over the idea of a planet populated by doctors and nurses.
After a week, people started to filter out of the hospital. Some headed home, others headed for family in hopes of good news, others started cleanup. The whole city stank, but eventually the smell replaced the noise as something that was just there that you learned to ignore.
Sitting on the top step of her brownstone, Addison pulls a jacket tighter around her shoulders and stares out at the empty streets. She barely looks up when Mark offers her a cup of tea.
“Now what?” He asks, sitting down next to her. He partly means about them, about the baby. But he mostly means about everything.
She shrugs and takes a sip. “We go find Derek.”
Neither of them have a car, because they’re both of the mindset that nobody drives in New York, so they steal one. She feels badly when he smashes the front window of her neighbor’s brownstone and reaches in to unlock the door. She never got to know these people and she tries to while he shuffles through mail and magazines and assorted front table junk to find the keys to the Suburban perfectly parallel parked out front. She studies pictures and bookshelves and tries to develop an opinion of Mr. and Mrs. Henry Schwartz, but she can’t. They seem average, normal, almost boring in their selections of vacation photos and Victorian literature. She turns around at the sound of her name and manages a weak smile when he dangles a keychain, complete with a pink plastic brontosaurus, in front of her.
They raid a Stop ‘n Shop on their way out of town. He makes a run for the groceries and she hops over the pharmacy counter to take what she knows they’ll need and then some. Antibiotics, prenatal vitamins, antihistamines, painkillers, she takes it all. She’s careful not to take anyone’s prescription still waiting for pickup, somehow feeling like that would be a violation even though they’ve already broken into a house, stolen a car, and are now emptying the shelves of a grocery store.
She meets him at the car and takes over when it’s clear that he has no idea how to pack. “I don’t like that,” she says when she sees him put a gun in the center console of the Suburban.
“I know,” he says, double checking that it isn’t loaded and that the safety’s on. “But we might need it.”
“Where did you get it?” She asks, trying not to think about the idea that the middle of the country might be more populated than New York City. She tosses a box of Lucky Charms back into the cart; they don’t need two.
“Security guard,” he says.
She winces and shuts the back hatch. “Let’s go.”
He waits until they’re out of the city before he tells her about his iPod. She shakes her head at him but plugs it in anyway and they spend the rest of New York State listening to The Beatles. She skips over "Let it Be" and makes them listen to "Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite" twice.
The highways are surprisingly clear of abandoned cars, but he’s still hesitant to go much more than eighty. She’s fine with that and props her feet up on the glove compartment and stares out the window. The clock on the dash seems wrong and she forgot to put her watch back on after changing out of the hazmat suit. Time doesn’t matter anyway. He won’t let her out of the car when he stops in Erie to siphon gas into their tank, so she laughs at his ineptitude from behind closed and tinted windows.
They set up camp somewhere east of Cleveland. It takes them the better part of an hour to get the tent together. She’d never used it and it’s been years since he has but after nearly smacking each other in the head with the poles at least twice, it’s up. She regrets ever teasing her husband for buying it because stretching out on the ground, while hard and there’s a rock in the middle of her back, is better than sleeping in the car. She wakes up just after sunrise and staggers out of the tent to throw up somewhere in the bushes. He rubs her back and asks her if she’s okay which, all things considered, is a very stupid question. She tells him as much and he smiles and mentions breakfast and ginger ale in the cooler.
She tries the radio and all they get is static. She isn’t surprised, but she’s desperate for news. She drives across Ohio trying not to think of everyone she knows who lived in Ohio. The list is small, but important. She focuses on Eddie Izzard’s discussion of the Death Star Canteen instead and thinks that the way Mark’s mouth moves with the monologue is kind of cute. It’s the first time she’s smiled since it happened.
“What are we going to call this?” She asks once the monologue is over.
“What do you mean?”
“We can’t just call it…it.” She gestures aimlessly before noticing that the alignment is off and the steering wheel requires her constant attention. Not like it matters, with no other cars on the road.
“You mean besides the spontaneous extinction of the human race?”
“Not extinct. Endangered.” It’s an important distinction.
He puts on his sunglasses. “The virus. The disease. The day in which almost everybody except for a statistically insignificant percentage of the population died?” His voice is bitter. This isn’t the direction he’d intended his life to turn.
“Nevermind.”
They cross into Indiana.
Their map runs out in Minnesota.
Mark points out that they don’t need a map: they just keep heading west and somewhere there will be a sign for Seattle.
Addison points at a sign above them which has three different highways, all heading west.
There’s a map of the country tacked on the wall of the rest area. She takes it with them.
Just inside St. Paul, they meet up with the first people they’ve seen since they dropped off the businessman they picked up in Cleveland by his house in Chicago. They welcome Mark and Addison with open arms and invite them to spend the night with them in the park. Glad to see other faces, they agree and are led to an impromptu community of tents.
Addison spends an hour after dinner highlighting the map by firelight. She groans when they’re informed that it rained a lot this year and there’s flooding around the banks of the Mississippi so it might be a while before they’re going anywhere. It isn’t that she doesn’t like Minnesota, she explains - though in reality she’s never been here before to form an opinion - it’s that moving keeps her mind off of what happened.
They have sex that night. It’s the first time since before it happened and it’s strangely moving for both of them. She reaches up to cup his cheek and is surprised to find it damp.
Three weeks later, the river has gone down enough to relinquish the shore line streets to mud. She’s beginning to show and the women of the camp encourage her to stay, but she shakes her head. She needs to keep moving. None of her pants fit anymore, so she leaves them behind and picks up a few summer dresses and a pair of too-big sweatpants and climbs back into the Suburban, map in hand.
They wave goodbye and are unexpectedly sad to be leaving the tiny group of survivors. But she turns on his iPod and chooses a hip-hop playlist and they keep the windows down. The June air is warm on her skin and she’s glad that somewhere in the back is a bottle of sunscreen.
Eighteen miles east of the North Dakota border, they pick up a passenger. She’s wearing cargo shorts, a tight black tanktop, and combat boots, with an Army jacket slung over her left arm and a guitar case by her feet. She nods her thanks when they stop. She climbs in, tossing her guitar case on the floor next to her. All she does is shrug when they ask her where she’s going.
She doesn’t speak much and they don’t ask. They’ve learned that some people are more willing to tell their stories than others. She plays her guitar every night by the campfire. Sometimes it’s recognizable, most of the time it isn’t. Occasionally she pulls out a notebook and jots down a few words, but mostly she just plays. Addison sits in between Mark’s legs, his arms loosely around her, and stares up at the bright stars in the sky and wonders if this view even changed when the world ended. Because that’s what she’s decided to call it, even if no one else will name it.
North Dakota goes on for a while.
They leave the tent packed in the Suburban as soon as they hit Montana. It’s warm enough and the bugs aren’t as bad as they expected and Addison’s growing stomach is starting to get in the way of being maneuverable.
The trip is taking longer than they thought. Detours around pileups, small towns completely barricaded by their now-dead occupants, herds of cattle and bison no longer restricted to fields and fences. They’ve had to navigate around rockslides more than once.
In the cereal aisle of a Western Family in Billings, she feels the baby kick. She smiles and puts her hand over her stomach. “Hi, there,” she whispers. Mark spends a few hours after dinner with a composition notebook and a sparkly pen that only mostly works and produces an extensive list of names. She tries to share his enthusiasm, but all she can think of is that this is real and the chances of a doctor are slim.
“It’ll be okay,” their passenger says. She still hasn’t told them her name and her words take them by surprise; they’re used to her singing or silent. She smiles at Addison’s stomach. “People did this for years without modern medicine. And it wasn’t aliens,” she looks at Mark. “We would’ve seen some by now if it was aliens.”
They wake up one morning and she’s gone. She’s started coffee and a note of thanks is stuck on the windshield of the Suburban. They can see her footprints in the mud heading south, but they don’t follow.
He’s frowning at the clouds when she grabs his hand and places it on her stomach. A smile grows over his face when he feels the baby move.
He tells her that he loves her.
Her eyes sparkle and it begins to rain.
They give up on the map for two days. Montana is worse than North Dakota.
Mark attempts celestial navigation with an astronomy book he found abandoned in a campground in Big Sky.
Addison says that they would have noticed if the Earth’s rotation changed and so, because the sun sets over there, they’re still heading west.
Eventually they hit Idaho.
They see the cheery sign welcoming them to Washington and realize that they have no idea what to do now. The feeling of panic grows as they drive closer to Seattle. He stashes his iPod in the center console above the gun they haven’t needed.
In the end, it’s practicality and luck that saves them. They find the hospital he left them for and dig around the administrative office for his information and come up with an address. Attached to his file is a Post-It with directions.
He’s sitting on the steps of an Airstream trailer, cup of coffee in his hand. He barely looks up when the Suburban’s wheels crunch over the gravel.
“This is new,” he says when Addison finally maneuvers her way out of the passenger seat.
“So is that,” she says and gestures to the woman standing in the doorway wearing nothing but a flannel shirt and rainboots.
He shrugs. “This is Meredith.”
They shake hands and the two men hug. It isn’t awkward.
“I’m glad you’re alive,” she says.
Derek smiles. “Back at’cha.”
“We have a tent,” Mark says when the other three begin to look worried about space.
All four of them look at each other and start to laugh. It isn’t funny, but it is.
Four months later, Addison’s daughter is born. She admits that she’s not sure who the father is, but nobody seems to care.
They name her Eve.
bear mccreary :: one year later
Rating: PG
Pairing: Mark/Addison, Mark/Derek/Addison, Derek/Addison, Derek/Meredith
Word Count: 2,452
Summary: Mark and Addison go on a post-apocalyptic road trip across the country to find their friend. Honest - this is not crack!fic.
Note: I have the apocalypse on the brain lately. I don’t know why; please forgive me for ending the world in this fic.
She was in New York when it happened.
Technically, she was in an abortion clinic in New York when it happened, but she tries not to think too much about that. She left when the muted CNN Headline News was suddenly interrupted by Wolf Blitzer and the closed-captioning mentioned something about a virus running rampant. She said a few words to the receptionist about being a doctor and her services needed elsewhere for the moment and she’d be back.
She wasn’t.
She went back to the hospital, was handed an awkward bright yellow quarantine suit and pulled her hair into a ponytail and went to work.
The best they could do was treat symptoms. They consulted with the CDC, the Air Force, hospitals and governments around the world. Nobody knew what it was or what happened. She didn’t sleep for a week, and neither did anyone she worked with, but in the end, it was too fast. The virus (they determined at least that much) killed too quickly for them to develop a vaccine. The concept of natural immunity was argued around day three, but at some point it was mentioned that most of the people still alive were either in biohazard suits, locked up in their apartments breathing recycled air, or actively dying so finding anyone with natural immunity was going to be difficult. It didn’t matter anyway.
Once it was over, and the air had been scanned and it was determined that they could ditch the hazmat suits, she told him about the baby. He mostly looked tired and said he needed a shower. They curled up together in the bottom bunk of an on call room, another couple already asleep on the top bunk, and slept. They sat in the cafeteria the next morning, surrounded by their coworkers as a few interns with kitchen skills served up better-than-usual eggs, hash browns and pancakes, and debated what had happened.
Mark thought it was aliens.
Addison thought it was an unusual strain of a tropical water-borne illness.
The female half of the couple they shared the bunk with asked why, if it was that, none of it looked familiar.
The male half thought the alien idea was stupid, too, but brushed past it and mulled over the idea of a planet populated by doctors and nurses.
After a week, people started to filter out of the hospital. Some headed home, others headed for family in hopes of good news, others started cleanup. The whole city stank, but eventually the smell replaced the noise as something that was just there that you learned to ignore.
Sitting on the top step of her brownstone, Addison pulls a jacket tighter around her shoulders and stares out at the empty streets. She barely looks up when Mark offers her a cup of tea.
“Now what?” He asks, sitting down next to her. He partly means about them, about the baby. But he mostly means about everything.
She shrugs and takes a sip. “We go find Derek.”
Neither of them have a car, because they’re both of the mindset that nobody drives in New York, so they steal one. She feels badly when he smashes the front window of her neighbor’s brownstone and reaches in to unlock the door. She never got to know these people and she tries to while he shuffles through mail and magazines and assorted front table junk to find the keys to the Suburban perfectly parallel parked out front. She studies pictures and bookshelves and tries to develop an opinion of Mr. and Mrs. Henry Schwartz, but she can’t. They seem average, normal, almost boring in their selections of vacation photos and Victorian literature. She turns around at the sound of her name and manages a weak smile when he dangles a keychain, complete with a pink plastic brontosaurus, in front of her.
They raid a Stop ‘n Shop on their way out of town. He makes a run for the groceries and she hops over the pharmacy counter to take what she knows they’ll need and then some. Antibiotics, prenatal vitamins, antihistamines, painkillers, she takes it all. She’s careful not to take anyone’s prescription still waiting for pickup, somehow feeling like that would be a violation even though they’ve already broken into a house, stolen a car, and are now emptying the shelves of a grocery store.
She meets him at the car and takes over when it’s clear that he has no idea how to pack. “I don’t like that,” she says when she sees him put a gun in the center console of the Suburban.
“I know,” he says, double checking that it isn’t loaded and that the safety’s on. “But we might need it.”
“Where did you get it?” She asks, trying not to think about the idea that the middle of the country might be more populated than New York City. She tosses a box of Lucky Charms back into the cart; they don’t need two.
“Security guard,” he says.
She winces and shuts the back hatch. “Let’s go.”
He waits until they’re out of the city before he tells her about his iPod. She shakes her head at him but plugs it in anyway and they spend the rest of New York State listening to The Beatles. She skips over "Let it Be" and makes them listen to "Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite" twice.
The highways are surprisingly clear of abandoned cars, but he’s still hesitant to go much more than eighty. She’s fine with that and props her feet up on the glove compartment and stares out the window. The clock on the dash seems wrong and she forgot to put her watch back on after changing out of the hazmat suit. Time doesn’t matter anyway. He won’t let her out of the car when he stops in Erie to siphon gas into their tank, so she laughs at his ineptitude from behind closed and tinted windows.
They set up camp somewhere east of Cleveland. It takes them the better part of an hour to get the tent together. She’d never used it and it’s been years since he has but after nearly smacking each other in the head with the poles at least twice, it’s up. She regrets ever teasing her husband for buying it because stretching out on the ground, while hard and there’s a rock in the middle of her back, is better than sleeping in the car. She wakes up just after sunrise and staggers out of the tent to throw up somewhere in the bushes. He rubs her back and asks her if she’s okay which, all things considered, is a very stupid question. She tells him as much and he smiles and mentions breakfast and ginger ale in the cooler.
She tries the radio and all they get is static. She isn’t surprised, but she’s desperate for news. She drives across Ohio trying not to think of everyone she knows who lived in Ohio. The list is small, but important. She focuses on Eddie Izzard’s discussion of the Death Star Canteen instead and thinks that the way Mark’s mouth moves with the monologue is kind of cute. It’s the first time she’s smiled since it happened.
“What are we going to call this?” She asks once the monologue is over.
“What do you mean?”
“We can’t just call it…it.” She gestures aimlessly before noticing that the alignment is off and the steering wheel requires her constant attention. Not like it matters, with no other cars on the road.
“You mean besides the spontaneous extinction of the human race?”
“Not extinct. Endangered.” It’s an important distinction.
He puts on his sunglasses. “The virus. The disease. The day in which almost everybody except for a statistically insignificant percentage of the population died?” His voice is bitter. This isn’t the direction he’d intended his life to turn.
“Nevermind.”
They cross into Indiana.
Their map runs out in Minnesota.
Mark points out that they don’t need a map: they just keep heading west and somewhere there will be a sign for Seattle.
Addison points at a sign above them which has three different highways, all heading west.
There’s a map of the country tacked on the wall of the rest area. She takes it with them.
Just inside St. Paul, they meet up with the first people they’ve seen since they dropped off the businessman they picked up in Cleveland by his house in Chicago. They welcome Mark and Addison with open arms and invite them to spend the night with them in the park. Glad to see other faces, they agree and are led to an impromptu community of tents.
Addison spends an hour after dinner highlighting the map by firelight. She groans when they’re informed that it rained a lot this year and there’s flooding around the banks of the Mississippi so it might be a while before they’re going anywhere. It isn’t that she doesn’t like Minnesota, she explains - though in reality she’s never been here before to form an opinion - it’s that moving keeps her mind off of what happened.
They have sex that night. It’s the first time since before it happened and it’s strangely moving for both of them. She reaches up to cup his cheek and is surprised to find it damp.
Three weeks later, the river has gone down enough to relinquish the shore line streets to mud. She’s beginning to show and the women of the camp encourage her to stay, but she shakes her head. She needs to keep moving. None of her pants fit anymore, so she leaves them behind and picks up a few summer dresses and a pair of too-big sweatpants and climbs back into the Suburban, map in hand.
They wave goodbye and are unexpectedly sad to be leaving the tiny group of survivors. But she turns on his iPod and chooses a hip-hop playlist and they keep the windows down. The June air is warm on her skin and she’s glad that somewhere in the back is a bottle of sunscreen.
Eighteen miles east of the North Dakota border, they pick up a passenger. She’s wearing cargo shorts, a tight black tanktop, and combat boots, with an Army jacket slung over her left arm and a guitar case by her feet. She nods her thanks when they stop. She climbs in, tossing her guitar case on the floor next to her. All she does is shrug when they ask her where she’s going.
She doesn’t speak much and they don’t ask. They’ve learned that some people are more willing to tell their stories than others. She plays her guitar every night by the campfire. Sometimes it’s recognizable, most of the time it isn’t. Occasionally she pulls out a notebook and jots down a few words, but mostly she just plays. Addison sits in between Mark’s legs, his arms loosely around her, and stares up at the bright stars in the sky and wonders if this view even changed when the world ended. Because that’s what she’s decided to call it, even if no one else will name it.
North Dakota goes on for a while.
They leave the tent packed in the Suburban as soon as they hit Montana. It’s warm enough and the bugs aren’t as bad as they expected and Addison’s growing stomach is starting to get in the way of being maneuverable.
The trip is taking longer than they thought. Detours around pileups, small towns completely barricaded by their now-dead occupants, herds of cattle and bison no longer restricted to fields and fences. They’ve had to navigate around rockslides more than once.
In the cereal aisle of a Western Family in Billings, she feels the baby kick. She smiles and puts her hand over her stomach. “Hi, there,” she whispers. Mark spends a few hours after dinner with a composition notebook and a sparkly pen that only mostly works and produces an extensive list of names. She tries to share his enthusiasm, but all she can think of is that this is real and the chances of a doctor are slim.
“It’ll be okay,” their passenger says. She still hasn’t told them her name and her words take them by surprise; they’re used to her singing or silent. She smiles at Addison’s stomach. “People did this for years without modern medicine. And it wasn’t aliens,” she looks at Mark. “We would’ve seen some by now if it was aliens.”
They wake up one morning and she’s gone. She’s started coffee and a note of thanks is stuck on the windshield of the Suburban. They can see her footprints in the mud heading south, but they don’t follow.
He’s frowning at the clouds when she grabs his hand and places it on her stomach. A smile grows over his face when he feels the baby move.
He tells her that he loves her.
Her eyes sparkle and it begins to rain.
They give up on the map for two days. Montana is worse than North Dakota.
Mark attempts celestial navigation with an astronomy book he found abandoned in a campground in Big Sky.
Addison says that they would have noticed if the Earth’s rotation changed and so, because the sun sets over there, they’re still heading west.
Eventually they hit Idaho.
They see the cheery sign welcoming them to Washington and realize that they have no idea what to do now. The feeling of panic grows as they drive closer to Seattle. He stashes his iPod in the center console above the gun they haven’t needed.
In the end, it’s practicality and luck that saves them. They find the hospital he left them for and dig around the administrative office for his information and come up with an address. Attached to his file is a Post-It with directions.
He’s sitting on the steps of an Airstream trailer, cup of coffee in his hand. He barely looks up when the Suburban’s wheels crunch over the gravel.
“This is new,” he says when Addison finally maneuvers her way out of the passenger seat.
“So is that,” she says and gestures to the woman standing in the doorway wearing nothing but a flannel shirt and rainboots.
He shrugs. “This is Meredith.”
They shake hands and the two men hug. It isn’t awkward.
“I’m glad you’re alive,” she says.
Derek smiles. “Back at’cha.”
“We have a tent,” Mark says when the other three begin to look worried about space.
All four of them look at each other and start to laugh. It isn’t funny, but it is.
Four months later, Addison’s daughter is born. She admits that she’s not sure who the father is, but nobody seems to care.
They name her Eve.
bear mccreary :: one year later