(no subject)

[more_awake]

Title: Expand, Contract [7/11]
Author: more_awake
Rating: PG-13
Pairing/Character: Mark (and a supporting cast of Archer, Sam, Naomi, and the Oceansiders)
Summary: In the aftermath of Addison's sudden death, Mark is left to grieve and raise their newborn daughter with the help of Addison's brother, friends, and the words she left behind. Set in an AU in which Addison kept the baby and went straight from NYC to LA after leaving Mark instead of taking a year-long detour in Seattle.
Previous chapters: one, two, three, four, five, six

Disclaimer: All television shows, movies, books, and other copyrighted material referred to in this work, and the characters, settings, and events thereof, are the properties of their respective owners. As this work is an interpretation of the original material and not for-profit, it constitutes fair use. Reference to real persons, places, or events are made in a fictional context, and are not intended to be libelous, defamatory, or in any way factual.

Chapter Seven

xx

She was wearing only a towel when she walked into the bedroom that night. Having just stepped out of the shower, her hair was still dripping, and she smelled like apricots, but rather than her usual confident posture, her shoulders were slumped forward, and her steps towards the dresser were slow. She seemed upset, tense, and preoccupied, and as she fished out a pair of panties and a tank top, he realized from his place on the bed that she was mumbling to herself.

Assuming that she had lost a patient, he propped himself up on his elbow and cleared his throat to get her attention, “Everything okay?”

She jumped in alarm. “I didn’t know you were awake,” she replied, her back still to him.

“Yeah, I’m up.” He had been asleep for a while already when she arrived back at his apartment, but the running water of the shower woke him. “Come here. Are you okay?”

He patted her side of the bed to get her to lie next to him, and she approached almost fearfully. Something was different about her lately-she seemed detached and avoidant, and he couldn’t figure out why.

”Hey,” he said gently, reaching out to put a hand on her shoulder after she lay down. “Rough day?”

He waited for her to begin some story about losing a mother or a baby or both, but instead, she surprised him by cupping the back of his head and crushing her mouth to his with a frantic desperation he hadn’t felt from her before. She sucked hard on his lower lip and pulled at his hair, and as soon as she slipped a hand into his boxers to stroke him, he had completely forgotten about having asked her a question at all. It was unexpected and intense, and he was all too happy to play along, quickly removing her towel and throwing it onto the floor behind him.

The onslaught was a little rougher and faster than usual, but because it seemed to be headed in the same familiar direction and he was more than enjoying it, he didn’t think to question anything; it just seemed like a method of stress relief. She was so beautiful as she pulled him on top of her, her chest heaving as she gasped for air, and he grinned at her before discarding his boxers and leaning down for another bruising kiss.

A minute later, as he was engrossed in leaving a line of open-mouthed kisses and small bites from her shoulder to behind her ear, she said it:

“I’m pregnant.”

And immediately, he froze.

“What?” He was so shocked that he could hardly speak, but he forced himself to push himself up on his forearms to look at her.

“I don’t want to discuss it.” Her face was blank-not happy, not sad, just emotionless green eyes staring back at him-and without hesitation, she wrapped her legs around his waist and thrust her hips upwards, hoping he would get the hint.

He did, but even as she resumed kissing him, there were a million questions swirling in his mind that would not allow him to move. He wondered if she had been pregnant all along. He wondered if she would go back to Derek.

“Does Derek know?”

She kissed him harder and pushed him onto his back.

“Derek isn’t the father, and I really do not want to talk right now.” She slid down onto him, grinding her hips against his, leaning forward to suck at his collarbone, and showing no signs of letting up any time soon.

Normally, he would have been incredibly turned on by her taking charge like that, but he was too caught up in what she had just told him. He was going to be a father. They were going to have a baby. It was huge, and he couldn’t just pretend, like her, that it wasn’t. He should have known something was up-she always used sex as a distraction. “Addie, stop. Stop.” His body absolutely wanted her to continue, but what she just told him was life-changing.

She ceased her movements but refused to look at him, so he rolled them so they were lying facing each other on the bed and slipped out of her.

“My god, Addison. We’re going to have a baby,” he had said breathlessly. Thoughts of their disagreements, all his other women, and her ever-present wedding ring were suddenly so far from his mind. All he could think about was them: Addison and their son or daughter. He hugged her tightly to convey his support and budding excitement. A family was something he never planned on, but with her, it seemed do-able-great, even. Her body stiffened, and once he realized that she was barely reciprocating, he pulled back to find that she still didn’t want to look at him. His heart sank. “You’re not happy?”

She ignored the question and avoided his eyes, pressing her body up against his and kissing him harshly over and over in an effort to get him to just shut up and continue their activities.

She seemed so desperate. Her breathing was heavy, and her hands and mouth were everywhere. “Let’s just… let’s just do this, okay? Please? Can we just do this?”

He was kissing her back-he couldn’t refuse-but mentally, he was somewhere else. Taking a deep breath to muster all the self-control in his body, he pulled away, grasped her hands, and held her still, stopping her once again.

“Addison-“

She looked at him pleadingly as she shook her head with a hint of tears in her eyes.

“No. Please, Mark, I need you. On top of me. Right now. Please?”

And because he is also a big fan of using sex as a distraction, he acquiesced against his better judgment. He wonders now if maybe he should have pushed harder to get her to talk, then maybe things could have ended differently. In hindsight, it’s excruciating. He was so close. Lying curled against her that night was really one of the only times that they were all three together as a family, and he didn’t even bother to savor the moment. He tries so hard to remember the post-sex details, but all he can manage to recall for sure is that he fell asleep before she did, excited about the baby and breathing in the faint scent of her expensive apricot-scented body wash.

He thought they had more time.

xx
“Naomi is worried about you,” Sam tells him one night after dinner while the Bennett girls are playing with Aurora in the living room at Addison’s house. “I’ve been telling her to just give you time and to let you say something if you need help, but I just want to make sure you really don’t need anything.”

“I’m fine.”

But they both know he’s not; the last six weeks are noticeably catching up to him. He barely remembers the last time he showered or shaved or even changed his clothes. There are used bottles and dishes sitting in the sink, and there is a growing mountain of dirty baby clothes on the floor in Aurora’s room (he can’t find it in himself to care about throwing them in the hamper). Each day is becoming hazy: falling in and out of sleep, thinking too much, and tending to the baby whenever she makes her presence or needs known. He barely has any energy. He also doesn’t have an appetite, so he only eats because he knows that he has to, and when he does, it’s usually only a snack. Naomi brings over dinner on most nights, which he appreciates more than he can say, but otherwise, he doesn’t have the time, energy, or patience to prepare an actual meal.

“Look, I remember how tough it was when we first had Maya. I can’t imagine how it must be to have to do all of it yourself, so if you need a few days to just regroup, we would be happy to take the baby.”

Sometimes he is so out of it now that he finds he doesn’t even talk to Aurora. Late one afternoon, he went to answer his phone, only to have his voice come out raspy because he hadn’t spoken all day. It’s all mechanical. He goes through the motions without much thought, and he knows it’s selfish, but right now, meeting his daughter’s physical needs is the best he can do.

“I’m fine,” he insists.

She still doesn’t sleep enough hours at a time, she is becoming a very fussy eater, her colic and reflux are still on-going issues, parts of the house are a complete mess, and he is a mess. He can’t sleep soundly even when she does-always thinking and over-thinking or just waiting to hear her wake up-and he doesn’t have it in him to actually get up and do anything productive. He just lays there instead of taking care of himself or the dishes or the laundry. Yes, he could use a few days or a week or even two to ‘regroup,’ as Sam said, but now that he knows that his friends are on the verge of divorce, there is no way he is going to ask for any more of their help. He doesn’t want to be even partially responsible for the break-up of another marriage.

“Okay. I’ll stop asking, but if Nae comes back in here and those bottles aren’t out of the sink and being cleaned, I’m in trouble, so can I at least help you with those?”

“Sam-”

“Come on, man. It needs to be done, and it will make her stop nagging me about checking up on you.”

“Fine,” he agrees, reluctantly pulling himself out of his chair and dragging his feet towards the sink. If doing this will help ease the tension between the friends who have done so much for him, he might as well do it.

“And maybe when we’re done, Nae and I can sit with the baby so you can go take a shower without having to worry about anything.”

Except that every time he showers in the bathroom of his guest room, he eventually finds himself sitting on the floor of the glass stall, clinging to a bottle of Addison’s apricot body wash and trying to remember how she smelled, felt, tasted, and sounded. It feels pathetic, so he avoids the situation as much as possible, but if Sam is nudging him towards cleaning himself up, he knows that he must look like a disaster. Which is embarrassing because until recently, he had always taken pride in his appearance. He’s a grown man, and now he’s a father. He shouldn’t have to be told when to bathe. That in itself is pathetic.

“Hey-where do you keep her little nail clippers?” Naomi asks as she enters the kitchen.

He started clipping Aurora’s fingernails earlier that day when he noticed that her little flailing hands had accidentally scratched her face. He waited until she was napping to do it, but he was only able to get through three tiny fingers before she moved in her sleep and caused him to nick her fingertip. He cringed and sucked in a sharp breath as he watched a small drop of her blood surfaced from the cut, and even though she didn’t seem to be in pain, he felt terribly guilty.

That was it for clipping baby fingernails for him.

Before he can answer Naomi about the nail clippers, though, Maya interrupts and yells from the living room, “Uncle Mark! Rory just barfed all over the carpet!”

Fantastic, he thinks. Aurora is still dealing with reflux even though he switched her formula two days ago. She has always spit up a lot since the day she came home from the hospital, but the frequency and volume has reached an all-time high in the last couple weeks.

“Mark, maybe you should get Cooper to check that out again?”

It never stops: wash clothes, shower, rinse and sanitize bottles, eat, wash dishes, feed the baby, play with the baby, change the baby, bathe the baby, sleep, wake up with the baby, listen to the baby scream and cry, calm the baby, clip the baby’s fingernails, take the baby to the doctor. He wonders how Addison would be handling all of this if she were around.

Her birthday is coming up this weekend; she would have been 39.

xx
“Well, she’s dropped a few ounces since her check-up last week,” Cooper informs him as he reads the scale where Aurora lays kicking her legs and wearing only a diaper. “How long has she been on the new formula?”

“About three days,” he answers honestly, knowing that he waited almost a week too long to finally ask Sam to pick some up at the store. He feels like a bad father, purposely letting her suffer by feeding her something that was clearly causing her discomfort and not giving her the proper nutrition she needed.

And as if that isn’t enough, he is mortified by what happens next. Just seconds after Cooper lifts Aurora off the scale, her eyes get wide, she makes a gurgling noise, and before Mark can even warn him, the baby spits up all over the front of her pediatrician’s button-down shirt.

“Whoa,” Cooper exclaims with a good-natured laugh as he wipes the baby’s mouth with his thumb.

“Oh god. Here,” Mark offers, fully embarrassed, as he reaches out to take his daughter. “Shit, I’m sorry. I knew I shouldn’t have fed her before putting her in the car.”

“Hey, don’t worry about it. I’m a pediatrician. Believe me, I’ve seen much worse,” Cooper assures him as he walks back towards his desk, seemingly unfazed by what just happened. “Like coming-out-both-ends kind of worse. A little baby spit-up is nothing compared to that.” He slides open a drawer, pulls out a fresh polo shirt, and tosses it onto his desk to change into after the appointment. “See? I’m prepared for this sort of thing. Don’t worry about it. And besides, now I can actually see what you’re dealing with.”

“She spit up in my mouth a few days ago.” It had been the last straw that finally drove him to ask Sam to pick up some new formula. “I’m not even quite sure how it happened, but my god…”

“Not your best moment together,” Cooper laughs sympathetically as he walks back over to them, wiping at his shoulder with a paper towel. “Okay. Let’s come up with a game plan to fix this.”

xx
Naomi wanted him to check in with her before they left the practice so that she could hear about Aurora’s appointment, so after settling his daughter back in her carseat carrier, he walked them a few doors over to his friend’s office. He didn’t think to knock, but he wished he had because when he entered, Naomi and Sam were bitterly arguing over something in elevated whispers.

“Sorry,” he mumbles awkwardly as he looks back and forth between the two, who have immediately stopped their conversation. “I’ll just head out.”

“Oh, no,” Naomi insists, trying to act as if nothing is wrong. “Come on in.”

“Yeah, I need to go anyway. I have a patient. You guys can go ahead,” Sam says as he walks towards the door, shooting Naomi a look over his shoulder as he leaves.

The tension between them seems worse than ever lately.

“Come sit down,” she says, motioning towards the couch in her office. "How did it go?”

“He gave me a list of things to try and a prescription that she, hopefully, will not have to use,” he replies, setting Aurora’s carseat and diaper bag on the floor and collapsing onto the couch.

“Sounds promising.” He is sure that she means it, but the smile on her face is forced, and she looks close to tears.

“She lost some weight, though, so we have to come back next week to make sure she’s gaining again and keeping formula down,” he continues. “Oh, and she ruined Cooper’s shirt.”

Aurora starts to fuss from her position on the floor, and Naomi jumps at the chance to tend to her.

“Aw, don’t worry about it. That kind of thing comes with the territory of being a pediatrician,” she assures him while lifting the baby to her shoulder. “It’ll come out in the wash.”

He shrugs and watches as Naomi cuddles Aurora and coos at her, stopping the little girl’s tears before they even start. She is so good with his daughter, and he really wishes that Sam would stop being such an idiot and realize how lucky he is to have her.

“Hey-so we were thinking about inviting Archer over for Addie’s birthday,” she says after a few minutes. He gives a somewhat juvenile whine of disapproval, and she responds in the voice that she probably uses when Maya does the same sort of thing. “No, none of that. You two ignoring each other is getting ridiculous.”

Even before their argument over Archer taking Aurora to the airport, the two of them weren’t exactly the best of friends. Professionally-driven, womanizing, cocky, and crass-their similar personalities have clashed ever since medical school.

“Yeah, well, he’s ignoring everybody,” he points out in defense.

“He’s still hurt and embarrassed over what happened last month, and he’s still grieving,” she reasons, shifting the baby to lay across her lap. “Mark, he rarely goes out anymore, and he hasn’t seen his niece in a month. That isn’t right.”

“He’s probably just writing.”

“Who cares what he’s been doing? He shouldn’t be alone on Sunday night, and as long as we’re all going to be together, he should be there, too.”

He is clearly losing this battle, and when he pauses to plan his next comeback, it occurs to him that there really is no good reason why Archer shouldn’t be invited to come over and a million reasons why he should. He hadn’t realized just how long it had been since Archer last saw Aurora. Not wanting to outright admit that he was wrong, though, he replies, “Even if you invite him, he’s never going to show.”

Archer flew out to the Montgomery summer estate on the shore of Martha’s Vineyard the day after Bizzy left, taking half of Addison’s ashes with him to disperse over the place where the two of them made their happiest childhood memories. He didn’t return phone calls, and when he arrived back in California, he would answer only occasionally for Naomi.

“Well, he picked up when I called last night, and when I asked him, he agreed to come over,” she tells him. “He sounded miserable, Mark, and he has too much pride to admit it or ask, but he needs to see that baby.”

“Fine.”

xx
At Cooper’s suggestion, he puts Aurora down for a nap in her baby swing after she eats. The swinging mechanism is turned off, so it’s stationary, and he is hoping that having her lay in a different sleeping position will help her stomach to settle. As her tired eyes fight to stay open, he tucks a thin yellow blanket over her and then settles back on the floor of the guest room to watch.

“You’re not missing anything exciting. You can sleep,” he tells her softly, brushing the back of his fingers over her cheek and allowing her to grasp his index finger. “Sleep for a looong time. That would be perfect.”

She is looking more like a real person these days. Her skin tone has changed from pink to one resembling her mother’s, and her eyes have faded from a deep cobalt to an icy greyish-blue that is identical to his own. Though she doesn’t strongly resemble either him or Addison yet, it is obvious that she is their child, and when he really stops to think about who this little girl is, it still amazes him to think that he and Addison actually made her together, that the genetic material that makes her her is half Addison’s and half his own.

She has been an especially overwhelming responsibility lately, but he is now optimistic that some things will soon change and give him back the sanity he needs to be her father. He has hope that something on the list Cooper gave him will be the solution to Aurora’s discomfort and inability to keep food down.

When she is finally asleep, he removes his finger from her grip and gingerly smoothes his hand over her wispy hair. “Feel better, baby.”
He’s so tired that he decides to just go to sleep on the floor next to her.

xx
He remembers her birthday last year-it wasn’t too long before their affair began. Derek was in Boston for a conference, and Addison, of course, was upset. They had grown especially close over the last few years as Derek’s absences became more frequent, and for the first time in his life, he found himself actually wanting to do something really special for someone else. He planned a surprise dinner-attended by Archer, Savvy, and Weiss-at her favorite restaurant, and then afterwards he took her home to watch a DVD of her choice. It was simple, but as she lay with her head in his lap on the couch, she confessed shyly that it was one of the best she had in years. She sat up and kissed him then, and though she ended it within a few seconds, he knew that they had overstepped the boundaries of regular, innocent friendship.

This year, he, Archer, Sam, and Naomi are sitting in silence on the back patio of her house without her. It’s dark, and the mood is tense and somber because no one knows what to say. He is slowly turning his half-empty glass of scotch around on the table, Archer is drowning his feelings with alcohol, Sam has been sipping the same beer since he arrived, and because she is the only one with an appetite, Naomi is halfway through Addison’s favorite double chocolate cheesecake. As a Catholic, she firmly believes that her friend is in a better place, and Mark envies that belief. He has never seen a reason to believe in anything, especially now, and he can’t help but think that life would be so much easier if he thought Addison were somewhere looking down on them with a glass of red wine and her own slice of cheesecake.

They sit like this for over an hour until Archer stands to pour himself yet another glass of scotch and breaks the silence.

“So did you even care about her at all or were you just using her because you knew she was vulnerable?”

Mark looks up to see Archer staring at him bitterly; he wasn’t expecting anyone to speak tonight, much less something like this. “What?”

“Addison,” he answers matter-of-factly, taking a sip of his drink. “Just admit it. You took advantage of her. You didn’t really care. I mean, if you did, how could you screw all those other women behind her back? How could you do that to her? Did you think she wouldn’t figure it out? Did you think she was stupid?”

He asks himself those questions nearly every day, but it seems a hundred times worse when someone else is pointing out exactly how he hurt her.

As Archer’s voice takes on an increasingly angry tone, Naomi gives Sam a look that prompts him to intervene. “Oh, come on. Archer-”

“No, Sam. He hurt her, and I want to know why and what the hell he was thinking.” Mark knows he can’t answer that, so he doesn’t even try. He is going to hate himself every day for the rest of his life for what happened, and it is humiliating that Archer is confronting him like this. “No excuse, huh?”

“Nope,” he murmurs vacantly.

He could argue that Archer has done the exact same thing to countless other women, minus getting them pregnant, but he doesn’t. It’s not going to make what he did any less wrong, and when he sees Archer’s fist clench, he knows what is coming next.

But he doesn’t care enough to even try to block the hit.

“Archer, no! No! Stop it!” Naomi scolds, jumping to her feet just as her husband steps in to restrain Archer from throwing another punch.

“Hey! No way, man. Back off,” Sam orders as he grabs Archer’s wrists.

He initially struggles against him, but then relents and smugly crosses his arms over his chest.

“I’ve wanted to do that for months,” he gloats.

“Well do you feel better now? Did it fix anything?” Naomi yells angrily. “I’ll answer that one for you, no, it didn’t.” She turns her back to Archer and goes to examine the bruise already forming on Mark’s face. “God, Mark. Are you okay?”

It hurts like hell, but outwardly, he just can’t seem to react. He knows deserved what just happened, but he is surprised to find that the pain doesn’t make him feel any less guilty.

“You’re done. I’m taking you home,” Sam tells Archer sternly, taking hold of his shoulder as if disciplining a child. “Now.”

“I can drive myself.”

“Like hell you will,” Naomi threatens. She might be angry with him, but there is no way she is letting him drive home when he is this intoxicated. “You’re upset, you have had too much to drink, and you can barely walk straight. If you try to drive like this, you’ll get into an accident and kill yourself.”

This seems to hit a nerve with Archer.

“You know what? Maybe I want to. Maybe I don’t care.”

“Stop it,” Naomi demands, her voice wavering. “Don’t say that.”

“No. I mean it. I don’t care anymore. I don’t fucking care about anything,” he insists through angry tears. “She’s dead. My sister is dead, and he never even apologized for what he did to her. God, when she showed up at my front door crying on the night she left him, I wanted to go over there and murder him with my bare hands, but I didn’t because she needed someone to take care of her more than she needed someone to kill him.

“And now he just gets to come in and be the hero when I was here all along. The only reason why Aurora exists is because I talked Addison into keeping her. She didn’t want to be the single mother of a baby whose father reminded her of the worst mistake of her life, but I told her I would take care of her and help her through everything, and I did. I moved here for her. I helped her through morning sickness, food cravings, and hormonal meltdowns because she was my sister and she needed someone because he wasn’t here. He didn’t do anything for them, but now he gets to fly in, take my niece from me, and have people tell him how fucking wonderful and great and selfless he is when he isn’t any of those things. He hurt her, and I-” His breath hitches when Aurora’s cries suddenly sound from the baby monitor sitting on the table. “I just miss her. I miss her so much, and it’s not fair that he gets to raise that little girl instead of her.”

Without hesitation, Mark grabs the baby monitor and pulls himself to his feet. He is in no condition-physically or emotionally-to do much of anything right now, but he really just needs an excuse to get away from this disaster of a night. Naomi looks up at him worriedly, and he knows that if he gives her another few seconds, she’ll offer to come in and help, but right now, he really just wants to be alone. “I’ll get her,” he assures her.

“Mark…” she trails off sympathetically.

“I’ll be fine. I’ve got her,” he insists. “Just get him the hell away from me.”
A/N: So. Archer is pissed, and his outburst is going to have a pretty big effect on Mark. Hopefully, I can get the next part out even faster than I did with this one. The plan is that this story will have 12 parts total, including the epilogue (the only part in which Aurora will not be a baby), but if I can finish up in fewer than that, I will. Anyway. Thank you for reading! :)