(no subject)
Fic - 813 words = 8 points
Title: Blind Optimism
Fandom: Grey's Anatomy
Pairing: Mark/Addison
Prompt: “I woke, she fled, and day brought back my night.”
He knows the moment he wakes to find the bed empty on her side, the covers tucked in immaculately, the smallest of imprints on the pillow the only sign that she has ever slept there at all. Briefly he wonders why she didn’t bother to fluff the pillow when she had gone to the trouble of tucking in the sheet, and then brushes the thought away impatiently. It’s irrelevant really, white noise buzzing in the roaring silence left by her departure.
He doesn’t find the note until later, and when he does he tosses it into the trash without bothering to read it. He already knows what it’s going to say and can’t bring himself to read the empty apologies
.
(He fishes it out later though, when he’s drunk and melancholy, runs his fingers over the letters of her name, feeling the indentations where the ballpoint has scratched against the paper. Then he throws it away again, berating himself for the masochism of reading it in the first place.)
He knew that this day would come, has known since they embarked on this reckless, foolish train wreck of a relationship. He thought that he had resigned himself to being second best, the knight who was able to steal the princess away only because the prince who she really wanted was too stupid to see what he was letting go. But then there had been the baby and, stupidly, he had let himself hope. It had not just been the child itself which he had been excited about (although he had been, and to a surprising degree, given that children had never been part of his life plan) but what it had meant for their relationship. Babies, he had thought in the blindly optimistic phase which had followed her announcement, cemented relationships. Well that had been stupid, and had he not been so hopelessly in love then he would have realised that. Yes, children could bind a couple together, but if the love wasn’t there then those bindings would quickly become chains. Apparently, that was how they had appeared to her.
He wonders, briefly, if it was all his fault. If he should have given her more space, less space, asked her how much space she needed. He goes over and over every second of their relationship, remembers the scrub nurse, that stupid drunken mistake that just kept coming back to haunt him, and hope to God that she didn’t find out about it. But even if she did, he reasons, it’s irrelevant, because the real problem is not him, but the man she left for him.
For a few days, he sits at home and drinks, looking for a solution to his problems at the bottom of the bottle. But it isn’t there, it will never be there, and so he returns to work and drowns his sorrows the only other way he knows how. That works for a while, in fact he even thinks that he might be over her, but then he returns to his cold, dark, empty apartment, and remembers the days when it wasn’t empty. Remembers the days when she was here to fill it. The pain of realising that even his old panacea won’t fix this is almost as bad as the pain of losing her.
He knows where she is, of course, but he also knows that he can’t follow her. Not, at least, until he has a proper reason to do so. Besides, he has to give her time to realise that her marriage really isn’t going to work out (and he has no faith in it functioning any better in Seattle than it did in New York, so he’s sure that, eventually, she will realise that). When he comes to collect her, he wants he to welcome him with open arms.
(The truth is, he just can’t handle being rejected again.)
Then he gets the call from Richard, and he knows that it’s his chance. He doesn’t know if she’s ready for a tearful reunion, or any kind of reunion for that matter. He doesn’t know if his ass of an (ex-)best friend has finally seen sense (although he severely doubts it). He knows very little, and that terrifies him, because he’s a man who likes to be in control. But he knows that it’s his chance, possibly his only chance, to get the woman of his dreams back, and he knows that he’d be a fool not to take it. So he puts his apartment up for rent, buys a one-way ticket to Seattle, and vows not to leave until she leaves with him. He’s no longer hoping for her to welcome him with open arms, he’s just hoping that she might hear him out.
Blind optimism may not have got him far before, but he figures that every guy deserves a second chance.
Graphics ( "Hell is empty. All of the devils are here.")
2 picspams with 44 images = 22 points, 11 icons (I didn't know which one to leave out) = 22 points. (Images from The Vampire Diaries).
