(no subject)
Blood on the Tracks - 01 - Tangled Up in Blue
Title: Blood on the Tracks - 02 - Simple Twist of Fate
Pairing: Mark/Addison. Derek/Addison.
Rating: R for language and situations and, oh, the angst.
Summary: In which I take vital information gleaned from 3.05 and 3.12 and combine it with the end of 1.09 and beginning of 2.01. In other words: baby, two months of a relationship, Addison appears in bitch clothing in Seattle.
“I’m late,” she says when he asks her what’s wrong. She stands in front of the mirror in her skirt and a bra, still undecided on the top, and blinks slowly, eventually deciding that it really is best to put mascara on the other eye, too.
He sets his hands on her hips and gently moves her out of the way and somehow knows that she’s not talking about the time. “How late?”
Addison looks sideways at him. “Three weeks.” Mouth open, she leans over the sink with the mascara wand in hand. She carefully sweeps on the black makeup, gently moving the wand from side to side to create body (or so said one of her many fashion magazines, all whose makeup looks she’s failed to recreate with regular success) and prays that he doesn’t push further.
He doesn’t and he kisses her on the cheek and tells her to have a good day when she comes back out of the bedroom fully clothed with shoes and a travel coffee mug in her hand. Mark waits for the front door to close before he lets out a deep breath. He closes his eyes and leans the back of his head against the wall.
--
Mark tries to catch her attention throughout the day but she merely shakes her head and manages to find something to do every time. He eventually finds her right as she’s finished post-op notes on her last surgery for a few hours so has no excuse and pulls her into an on call room and doesn’t care who sees them.
“I’m pregnant, Mark,” she says quietly before he has a chance to give her a look or say anything. Tears fill her eyes and she looks away, clenching her fists so tightly to keep from crying that the half-moons left by her fingernails in her palms might not leave for hours. She looks back at him. “I’m pregnant. I’m pregnant and my husband has left me for some slutty intern and I’m living in adulterous hell with his best friend who’s really bad at hiding that he’s cheating on me. Give me a little bit.” She walks out and heads for the supply closet right next door.
Though he knows that she has a point about the fact that the situation isn’t born out of pure unadulterated bliss and that it’s really quite inconvenient (and while he’s pro-choice, he winces a little at the idea that a baby is inconvenient, especially his), he’s overjoyed beneath the shock. But masking his emotions is what Mark does best from all but two people so he puts on the normal nonchalant look he carries all day long and leaves.
After making sure that the door is securely propped shut, Addison digs her cell phone out of her lab coat pocket and sits on an upturned bucket. If she were having a bad day, if things had gone wrong, if any kind of shit had hit any brand of fan, she would find Derek. The thought of that alone forces the tears to start falling because she’s suddenly twenty-two again after her mother died the morning of an anatomy final she ended up failing and needs a hug from him as he tells her that everything will be alright. When Derek’s unavailable, she usually finds Mark. But she saw the look in Mark’s eyes and she isn’t sure if she’ll ever be able to explain to him how she feels through his haze of excited soon-to-be parenthood.
So she calls Savvy, who she’s known longest and best and won’t tell her a thing she wants to hear but will tell her everything she needs to hear.
--
Addison comes home to a Yankees calendar tacked up on the wall and she doesn’t need to flip through it to know that the due date’s circled. She’s also pretty certain that the box on the table contains something equally overly-Yankees (she’s a fan because Derek’s a fan and when your husband’s a fan and you’re a New Yorker you sort of have to like the Yankees) like a onesie or tiny socks. She opens the box and musses with the pinstriped tissue paper so she can say with accuracy what it is and oh, how cute.
“Hey,” Mark says with a smile and kisses her cheek.
“Mark.” She watches him walk around the kitchen cooking dinner. He’s used every single pot and pan and fork and knife and measuring cup possible for what looks like spaghetti and meatballs and she cracks a small smile at that because Mark hates cooking and he’s doing it for her. Addison bites her lower lip and then steps into the kitchen and adjusts the heat on the meat sauce for him, breathing through her mouth because smells have been setting her off for the past two weeks. As it is, it’s not enough and a wave of nausea hits her and she runs to the bathroom. “I’m fine,” she weakly assures him when he asks if she’s okay. “Air out the kitchen,” is her answer to if there’s anything he can do.
He’s waiting with a glass of ginger ale for her and she smiles her thanks as she chases two tablets of Pepto with it. She doesn’t remember the ginger ale being there that morning and it’s becoming harder to tell him what she needs to.
“We need to talk,” she says after dinner. The weird food cravings haven’t hit yet and she sticks to bread and butter because her stomach asks her to and Mark ate what he had actually cooked and said it wasn’t that bad. She scoots to the other end of the couch when he tries to wrap an arm around her. “Stop it. We need to talk.”
Mark scans her face for any sign of what details they need to talk about and then he sees in her eyes that she doesn’t want his baby and a part of his heart dies.
“Hear me out. Please.” She waits for his nod and she feels so guilty for what is inevitably an incredibly selfish decision because she knows that, if they try, they could make it work and make it all work well. But she isn’t sure that the two of them even know how to try to make anything work besides sex and who gets the shower first in the morning.
“I do want a baby, Mark. I do. I just...I want one with Derek. And I think you know that. Things aren’t happening the way they’re supposed to.” She laughs through her coming tears because that’s all she can do at the moment. “And I’m not in any position to raise a child. I’m screwed up, I’m unhappy, I’m in love with someone who’s sleeping with somebody else so I’m screwing the best friend of the person I’m in love with. I am a mess.” She makes a point to put it all on herself so he has no room to claim that he can change. There’s no way she’ll be able to go through with it if he makes promises. “I can’t have this baby. I want it but I can’t have it. Not right now.” Her throat thick with tears, she looks straight at him. “I’m sorry, Mark.”
While Addison reaches for the box of tissues and cries a little, Mark’s in shock. He should’ve seen it coming but even if he had it would still hurt.
“I know that you want this. I mean...you’re not usually a kid guy but you were ecstatic for the rest of the day and the calendar and the onesie and dinner and everything. But I can’t. And a child deserves a mother who can devote all of her energy toward it.”
He nods, understanding the last part.
She tugs her lower lip with her teeth and throws out the monologue she had planned for her next statement. “I really don’t think I can handle a baby right now. I made an appointment for next Wednesday. Mark, I need you to be on board with this. Because if you’re not, I won’t do it and I’ll do everything I can to be the sanest and best mother possible. But...my head’s a wreck and was a wreck before I found I’m pregnant.” Her original plan was to tell him that she’s doing it whether he’s okay with it or not. But every minute that she watched him while she spoke was another minute she spent feeling like it might in some strange way be able to work.
“Think about it.” She stands up and goes to collect her purse.
“Where are you going?”
“Brownstone for a few days. You need to think about it without me and I need some space.”
Mark twists around the back of the couch. “You sure you’re okay to go back there?” He was with her when she went back the first time after that night and it wasn’t pretty.
She nods. “Savvy’s there, I’ll be okay. See you tomorrow.”
He watches her leave and stays on the couch until his foot falls asleep. His initial reaction is to call her right now and tell her no, he’s not on board. Because all of her reasons were about her, there was no logic about him and he thinks in his self-absorbed way that her choice is just for her not for the baby (though he can see some extended logic there) and certainly not for him. But his heart ached for her while she was speaking and he knows that it’s really not something she wants to do and her feelings aren’t simply because he’s not her husband or because she flippantly just doesn’t want one right now.
Because it’s what he’s always done, he picks up his phone without thinking and calls Derek but he comes to his senses and hangs up before it can start to ring. Some part of him thinks that Derek has a right to know, not just because Addison is his wife but also because he’s Mark’s best friend and best friends are supposed to know these kinds of things and help. And he certainly needs help figuring this one out. But he puts his phone aside and pushes some now-cold pasta around his plate and sighs. Derek can’t be the one to help him figure things out this time.
--
He pushes the doorbell on the brownstone a second time.
“Oh, hey.” She steps back and lets him in. She’s a little out of breath because she was upstairs and wasn’t sure if she actually heard the doorbell ring or not. Even though she knows Derek isn’t coming back, and if he did that he wouldn’t ring the doorbell, she still pauses the television or turns down the music every time she hears something that might be the door.
“Dinner smells good,” he offers as small talk. They haven’t really spoken since the night she told him.
Addison laughs. “You can have it. I’m kind of changing my mind about it right now.”
“I don’t like it,” he says and his voice stops her two steps away from the kitchen. Mark watches her back as she holds perfectly still. “I don’t like it at all. But I can’t ask you to do something that you’re not comfortable with. I can’t ask you to have a baby if you can’t be at your best. If it’s not what you want, if it’s not something you can do, I can’t ask you to keep it.”
“Thank you,” she whispers shakily.
Words spoken, Mark walks to her and slips his arms around her waist and kisses her cheek. “I can’t be there for it, but I’ll be here when you get home.”
She nods, knowing and completely understanding what he means and wishes she didn’t have to be there for it either.
--
She looks drained. Drained and pale and kind of gray. Mark looks up from his chair as she simply stands in the hallway of her brownstone. She decided that she wanted to be there instead of Mark’s loft because it was more her home out of the two. He stands up and is about to go to her when she drops everything and runs to the bathroom to throw up. He gives her a minute, knowing that it’s stress and the enormity of it all and probably a side effect of something; vomiting always is.
He knocks before he steps in with her. He sets a glass of water on the floor by her knee and wets a washcloth with cool water to put on the back of her neck before kneeling down next to her and rubbing her back. When she’s ready, he helps her up and allows her to walk on her own down the hallway and up the stairs to bed. Out of respect for her, he stays outside the bedroom while she changes into something more comfortable and long after he’s sure she’s settled does he come in.
Addison curls up on her side facing away from him and he quietly lifts the covers and slides in next to her, wrapping an arm around her as he molds his body to match hers. “I love you,” he whispers. It’s a sentiment he’s told her before and theoretically shouldn’t feel now but he does. He loves her because she gave him the power to choose, that she involved him. At the same time, he hates her for that because it would be easier on his conscience if she had just done it whether he was involved in the decision or not.
“I killed your baby,” she whispers, voice completely flat and devoid of emotion. She takes a deep shaky breath, aware that the tears will come later but the pain is coming now and she snuggles back into Mark’s chest and lets him hold her as she waits for it to stop hurting.
--
Unsurprisingly, it’s the downfall of their already-failing relationship. Mark stops trying to cover his tracks when he sleeps with other women, Addison stops pretending that she doesn’t notice. The sex is angrier, more competitive, tender only when one of them has had a particularly rough day.
“Look,” Addison says firmly with her hand on her hip one day after finally having it with hearing about him and another woman and how it must feel to be her at every turn. “I get that you hate that I had an abortion. I hate that I had an abortion. But it needed to happen, Mark.”
“No, it didn’t.”
“Did you see us before then? You were sleeping with other women, I was crying every day in a closet because I miss my husband and am too terrified of his reaction to call him and say so, and the only thing we’re good at together that doesn’t involve a bed is surgery.”
“That could’ve changed,” he says in a deep quiet voice.
“No, it couldn’t,” she says softly. “My heart’s always going to belong to Derek and even after years you wouldn’t be able to have all of it. You’re an all-or-nothing guy, you always have been.”
He clenches his teeth. “If I’m an all-or-nothing guy, why am I trying to make this work with you?”
“That’s the thing, Mark. You’re not.”
“Neither are you,” he points out.
“I’m married and love my husband. I don’t have an obligation to.” She picks up a bag by her feet. “I leave for Seattle in a couple days, Richard needs me for something.”
When she goes to find him to say goodbye, because they’re friends and friends do that, she should have seen it coming. She should have known that he would lock himself (but not lock the door) in an on call room with a nurse and give someone else the instruction to tell her where to find him. He has petty moments like that and she suspects that, somehow, she deserves it so she quietly shuts the door and walks out with a shrug to go home and finish packing her bag.
--
Clothed entirely in black with her hair curled and nails done, she clicks her way across the tile floor in the silent hospital to a reception desk where she’s about to ask where her husband is. She figures she’ll find Richard tomorrow, hoping he finally got some sense about him to go home to Adele at the end of the night. But she stops just before she asks someone because she hears his voice from the waiting area behind her. She whirls around and sees him fixing the jacket collar of a skinny mousy blonde who has to be Meredith. She takes a moment to compose herself after wondering whether his standards dropped or he just couldn’t find anyone like her and confidently walks over.
He looks up and stares straight at her, a combination of shock and horror on his face. Derek never expected her to show up in Seattle even though she’d been calling him all day.
Derek puts his hand on Meredith’s arm, deeply apologetic. “Meredith, I am so sorry.”
Addison casually walks toward him and puts her hand on her hip, leaning all her weight on one leg. She looks entirely detached and halfway amused.
“Addison. What are you doing here?” Part of it’s real, most of it’s an act. He misses her, but he can’t give that away to Meredith. And right now is not a good time for her to show up; he doesn’t miss her that much and steak and wine and sex with Meredith seemed like a pretty good end to an insane day to him.
“Well, you’d know if you bothered to return any one of my phone calls.” She raises her eyebrows at him expectantly and blatantly ignores Meredith. She finds the other woman a bit of a joke. After a few moments of pausing, she turns to Meredith with a condescending look and tone and offers her her hand. “Hi. I’m Addison Shepherd.”
Derek glares at her. Yes, she’s definitely in bitch mode and sure he’s been cheating on her with Meredith for two months but Meredith isn’t her best friend and she didn’t walk in on it. Meredith’s an innocent out of the three of them, she doesn’t deserve what Addison’s about to do and Derek can’t do a thing to stop it. It’s like a train wreck.
“Shepherd?” Meredith asks meekly, hoping it’s a big joke. Her eyes waver between Addison and Derek. It’s a stupid question and she should’ve known. Derek told her nothing about his decision to come to Seattle and live in a trailer; she’s usually the kind of girl who suspects that something’s going to go wrong at any moment with any relationship and his lack of personal background information should’ve thrown up a contingent of red flags and would have if she hadn’t been blinded by his smile and hair and the way he cared about her like no one else ever had.
Addison nods. “And you must be the woman who’s been screwing my husband.” She feels awful the minute she says it - she’s usually not that bitchy when she’s being bitchy - but her lover made a point of it that her last sight of him would be his naked back on top of some trashy nurse and somewhere she’s certain she’s stockpiled a few freebies by keeping her mouth shut at other times. She looks away from Meredith and looks at Derek, who looks back at her, and she vaguely registers Meredith awkwardly looking from one to the other with her mouth open in confusion and betrayal.
“Addison, what are you doing here?” He spits out the question again after Meredith leaves, presumably to go drink herself silly. No matter how much part of him still cares for her, he can’t get over what she said to Meredith.
“Relax, Derek. I’m here for work,” she says coyly after running him through a few teasing hoops he clearly isn’t thrilled about. She has to break eye contact. She isn’t sure whether the pain in his eyes at seeing her again hurts or if it’s the total anger and rage she feels radiating from him that hurts. Still reeling from adultery, an abortion and an incredible disaster of what once seemed like it could be a good idea, she smiles and says that she’ll see him later and leaves, needing to get out of there.
Derek stares at her retreating back and closes his eyes, his shoulders drooping. He wants to hate her with every neuron and nerve and cell. She cheated on him after ten years of marriage and did it with his best friend and he doesn’t care that he wasn’t around, she still shouldn’t have done it. And then she has the audacity to show up in his city and tease about Meredith.
And he does, really. He feels badly about it, because he still loves her even though he wishes he didn’t, but he does hate her. In that instant, the moment she mocked Meredith to her face, he started hating her. And again when she joked about Meredith seeming sweet. His mother once told him that it’s possible to hate the person you love, she even said it was a necessary part of marriage sometimes, but that doesn’t make him feel any better. He sits down and rubs his face in his hands for a few minutes before deciding that he really does need to go home and lie in his bed and stare at the ceiling because sleep certainly won’t be happening.
--
She deletes all the messages on her voicemail after listening to the first three words of each (uncreative, yet predictable, the same three words each time) and mass deletes the text messages in her inbox after she sees who they’re from. Tugging on a t-shirt, Addison flops onto the hotel bed and waits for hot water to boil so she can make some tea and help her fall asleep. That she’s still on New York time should’ve taken care of that on its own, but the confrontation with Derek woke her straight up again.
The room phone rings and she jumps and answers it and tells the voice on the other end to put him through because she knows who it is, but that anyone after this should leave a message.
“Please stop calling me.” She sets the receiver down calmly and somehow falls off the bed and the tears that were prickling at her eyes now fall freely down her cheeks. The water starts to boil and she scrambles up and she shakily pours the water into a mug, barely managing to drop the tea bag in without spilling anything.
Blood on the Tracks - 03 - You're a Big Girl Now
Title: Blood on the Tracks - 02 - Simple Twist of Fate
Pairing: Mark/Addison. Derek/Addison.
Rating: R for language and situations and, oh, the angst.
Summary: In which I take vital information gleaned from 3.05 and 3.12 and combine it with the end of 1.09 and beginning of 2.01. In other words: baby, two months of a relationship, Addison appears in bitch clothing in Seattle.
“I’m late,” she says when he asks her what’s wrong. She stands in front of the mirror in her skirt and a bra, still undecided on the top, and blinks slowly, eventually deciding that it really is best to put mascara on the other eye, too.
He sets his hands on her hips and gently moves her out of the way and somehow knows that she’s not talking about the time. “How late?”
Addison looks sideways at him. “Three weeks.” Mouth open, she leans over the sink with the mascara wand in hand. She carefully sweeps on the black makeup, gently moving the wand from side to side to create body (or so said one of her many fashion magazines, all whose makeup looks she’s failed to recreate with regular success) and prays that he doesn’t push further.
He doesn’t and he kisses her on the cheek and tells her to have a good day when she comes back out of the bedroom fully clothed with shoes and a travel coffee mug in her hand. Mark waits for the front door to close before he lets out a deep breath. He closes his eyes and leans the back of his head against the wall.
--
Mark tries to catch her attention throughout the day but she merely shakes her head and manages to find something to do every time. He eventually finds her right as she’s finished post-op notes on her last surgery for a few hours so has no excuse and pulls her into an on call room and doesn’t care who sees them.
“I’m pregnant, Mark,” she says quietly before he has a chance to give her a look or say anything. Tears fill her eyes and she looks away, clenching her fists so tightly to keep from crying that the half-moons left by her fingernails in her palms might not leave for hours. She looks back at him. “I’m pregnant. I’m pregnant and my husband has left me for some slutty intern and I’m living in adulterous hell with his best friend who’s really bad at hiding that he’s cheating on me. Give me a little bit.” She walks out and heads for the supply closet right next door.
Though he knows that she has a point about the fact that the situation isn’t born out of pure unadulterated bliss and that it’s really quite inconvenient (and while he’s pro-choice, he winces a little at the idea that a baby is inconvenient, especially his), he’s overjoyed beneath the shock. But masking his emotions is what Mark does best from all but two people so he puts on the normal nonchalant look he carries all day long and leaves.
After making sure that the door is securely propped shut, Addison digs her cell phone out of her lab coat pocket and sits on an upturned bucket. If she were having a bad day, if things had gone wrong, if any kind of shit had hit any brand of fan, she would find Derek. The thought of that alone forces the tears to start falling because she’s suddenly twenty-two again after her mother died the morning of an anatomy final she ended up failing and needs a hug from him as he tells her that everything will be alright. When Derek’s unavailable, she usually finds Mark. But she saw the look in Mark’s eyes and she isn’t sure if she’ll ever be able to explain to him how she feels through his haze of excited soon-to-be parenthood.
So she calls Savvy, who she’s known longest and best and won’t tell her a thing she wants to hear but will tell her everything she needs to hear.
--
Addison comes home to a Yankees calendar tacked up on the wall and she doesn’t need to flip through it to know that the due date’s circled. She’s also pretty certain that the box on the table contains something equally overly-Yankees (she’s a fan because Derek’s a fan and when your husband’s a fan and you’re a New Yorker you sort of have to like the Yankees) like a onesie or tiny socks. She opens the box and musses with the pinstriped tissue paper so she can say with accuracy what it is and oh, how cute.
“Hey,” Mark says with a smile and kisses her cheek.
“Mark.” She watches him walk around the kitchen cooking dinner. He’s used every single pot and pan and fork and knife and measuring cup possible for what looks like spaghetti and meatballs and she cracks a small smile at that because Mark hates cooking and he’s doing it for her. Addison bites her lower lip and then steps into the kitchen and adjusts the heat on the meat sauce for him, breathing through her mouth because smells have been setting her off for the past two weeks. As it is, it’s not enough and a wave of nausea hits her and she runs to the bathroom. “I’m fine,” she weakly assures him when he asks if she’s okay. “Air out the kitchen,” is her answer to if there’s anything he can do.
He’s waiting with a glass of ginger ale for her and she smiles her thanks as she chases two tablets of Pepto with it. She doesn’t remember the ginger ale being there that morning and it’s becoming harder to tell him what she needs to.
“We need to talk,” she says after dinner. The weird food cravings haven’t hit yet and she sticks to bread and butter because her stomach asks her to and Mark ate what he had actually cooked and said it wasn’t that bad. She scoots to the other end of the couch when he tries to wrap an arm around her. “Stop it. We need to talk.”
Mark scans her face for any sign of what details they need to talk about and then he sees in her eyes that she doesn’t want his baby and a part of his heart dies.
“Hear me out. Please.” She waits for his nod and she feels so guilty for what is inevitably an incredibly selfish decision because she knows that, if they try, they could make it work and make it all work well. But she isn’t sure that the two of them even know how to try to make anything work besides sex and who gets the shower first in the morning.
“I do want a baby, Mark. I do. I just...I want one with Derek. And I think you know that. Things aren’t happening the way they’re supposed to.” She laughs through her coming tears because that’s all she can do at the moment. “And I’m not in any position to raise a child. I’m screwed up, I’m unhappy, I’m in love with someone who’s sleeping with somebody else so I’m screwing the best friend of the person I’m in love with. I am a mess.” She makes a point to put it all on herself so he has no room to claim that he can change. There’s no way she’ll be able to go through with it if he makes promises. “I can’t have this baby. I want it but I can’t have it. Not right now.” Her throat thick with tears, she looks straight at him. “I’m sorry, Mark.”
While Addison reaches for the box of tissues and cries a little, Mark’s in shock. He should’ve seen it coming but even if he had it would still hurt.
“I know that you want this. I mean...you’re not usually a kid guy but you were ecstatic for the rest of the day and the calendar and the onesie and dinner and everything. But I can’t. And a child deserves a mother who can devote all of her energy toward it.”
He nods, understanding the last part.
She tugs her lower lip with her teeth and throws out the monologue she had planned for her next statement. “I really don’t think I can handle a baby right now. I made an appointment for next Wednesday. Mark, I need you to be on board with this. Because if you’re not, I won’t do it and I’ll do everything I can to be the sanest and best mother possible. But...my head’s a wreck and was a wreck before I found I’m pregnant.” Her original plan was to tell him that she’s doing it whether he’s okay with it or not. But every minute that she watched him while she spoke was another minute she spent feeling like it might in some strange way be able to work.
“Think about it.” She stands up and goes to collect her purse.
“Where are you going?”
“Brownstone for a few days. You need to think about it without me and I need some space.”
Mark twists around the back of the couch. “You sure you’re okay to go back there?” He was with her when she went back the first time after that night and it wasn’t pretty.
She nods. “Savvy’s there, I’ll be okay. See you tomorrow.”
He watches her leave and stays on the couch until his foot falls asleep. His initial reaction is to call her right now and tell her no, he’s not on board. Because all of her reasons were about her, there was no logic about him and he thinks in his self-absorbed way that her choice is just for her not for the baby (though he can see some extended logic there) and certainly not for him. But his heart ached for her while she was speaking and he knows that it’s really not something she wants to do and her feelings aren’t simply because he’s not her husband or because she flippantly just doesn’t want one right now.
Because it’s what he’s always done, he picks up his phone without thinking and calls Derek but he comes to his senses and hangs up before it can start to ring. Some part of him thinks that Derek has a right to know, not just because Addison is his wife but also because he’s Mark’s best friend and best friends are supposed to know these kinds of things and help. And he certainly needs help figuring this one out. But he puts his phone aside and pushes some now-cold pasta around his plate and sighs. Derek can’t be the one to help him figure things out this time.
--
He pushes the doorbell on the brownstone a second time.
“Oh, hey.” She steps back and lets him in. She’s a little out of breath because she was upstairs and wasn’t sure if she actually heard the doorbell ring or not. Even though she knows Derek isn’t coming back, and if he did that he wouldn’t ring the doorbell, she still pauses the television or turns down the music every time she hears something that might be the door.
“Dinner smells good,” he offers as small talk. They haven’t really spoken since the night she told him.
Addison laughs. “You can have it. I’m kind of changing my mind about it right now.”
“I don’t like it,” he says and his voice stops her two steps away from the kitchen. Mark watches her back as she holds perfectly still. “I don’t like it at all. But I can’t ask you to do something that you’re not comfortable with. I can’t ask you to have a baby if you can’t be at your best. If it’s not what you want, if it’s not something you can do, I can’t ask you to keep it.”
“Thank you,” she whispers shakily.
Words spoken, Mark walks to her and slips his arms around her waist and kisses her cheek. “I can’t be there for it, but I’ll be here when you get home.”
She nods, knowing and completely understanding what he means and wishes she didn’t have to be there for it either.
--
She looks drained. Drained and pale and kind of gray. Mark looks up from his chair as she simply stands in the hallway of her brownstone. She decided that she wanted to be there instead of Mark’s loft because it was more her home out of the two. He stands up and is about to go to her when she drops everything and runs to the bathroom to throw up. He gives her a minute, knowing that it’s stress and the enormity of it all and probably a side effect of something; vomiting always is.
He knocks before he steps in with her. He sets a glass of water on the floor by her knee and wets a washcloth with cool water to put on the back of her neck before kneeling down next to her and rubbing her back. When she’s ready, he helps her up and allows her to walk on her own down the hallway and up the stairs to bed. Out of respect for her, he stays outside the bedroom while she changes into something more comfortable and long after he’s sure she’s settled does he come in.
Addison curls up on her side facing away from him and he quietly lifts the covers and slides in next to her, wrapping an arm around her as he molds his body to match hers. “I love you,” he whispers. It’s a sentiment he’s told her before and theoretically shouldn’t feel now but he does. He loves her because she gave him the power to choose, that she involved him. At the same time, he hates her for that because it would be easier on his conscience if she had just done it whether he was involved in the decision or not.
“I killed your baby,” she whispers, voice completely flat and devoid of emotion. She takes a deep shaky breath, aware that the tears will come later but the pain is coming now and she snuggles back into Mark’s chest and lets him hold her as she waits for it to stop hurting.
--
Unsurprisingly, it’s the downfall of their already-failing relationship. Mark stops trying to cover his tracks when he sleeps with other women, Addison stops pretending that she doesn’t notice. The sex is angrier, more competitive, tender only when one of them has had a particularly rough day.
“Look,” Addison says firmly with her hand on her hip one day after finally having it with hearing about him and another woman and how it must feel to be her at every turn. “I get that you hate that I had an abortion. I hate that I had an abortion. But it needed to happen, Mark.”
“No, it didn’t.”
“Did you see us before then? You were sleeping with other women, I was crying every day in a closet because I miss my husband and am too terrified of his reaction to call him and say so, and the only thing we’re good at together that doesn’t involve a bed is surgery.”
“That could’ve changed,” he says in a deep quiet voice.
“No, it couldn’t,” she says softly. “My heart’s always going to belong to Derek and even after years you wouldn’t be able to have all of it. You’re an all-or-nothing guy, you always have been.”
He clenches his teeth. “If I’m an all-or-nothing guy, why am I trying to make this work with you?”
“That’s the thing, Mark. You’re not.”
“Neither are you,” he points out.
“I’m married and love my husband. I don’t have an obligation to.” She picks up a bag by her feet. “I leave for Seattle in a couple days, Richard needs me for something.”
When she goes to find him to say goodbye, because they’re friends and friends do that, she should have seen it coming. She should have known that he would lock himself (but not lock the door) in an on call room with a nurse and give someone else the instruction to tell her where to find him. He has petty moments like that and she suspects that, somehow, she deserves it so she quietly shuts the door and walks out with a shrug to go home and finish packing her bag.
--
Clothed entirely in black with her hair curled and nails done, she clicks her way across the tile floor in the silent hospital to a reception desk where she’s about to ask where her husband is. She figures she’ll find Richard tomorrow, hoping he finally got some sense about him to go home to Adele at the end of the night. But she stops just before she asks someone because she hears his voice from the waiting area behind her. She whirls around and sees him fixing the jacket collar of a skinny mousy blonde who has to be Meredith. She takes a moment to compose herself after wondering whether his standards dropped or he just couldn’t find anyone like her and confidently walks over.
He looks up and stares straight at her, a combination of shock and horror on his face. Derek never expected her to show up in Seattle even though she’d been calling him all day.
Derek puts his hand on Meredith’s arm, deeply apologetic. “Meredith, I am so sorry.”
Addison casually walks toward him and puts her hand on her hip, leaning all her weight on one leg. She looks entirely detached and halfway amused.
“Addison. What are you doing here?” Part of it’s real, most of it’s an act. He misses her, but he can’t give that away to Meredith. And right now is not a good time for her to show up; he doesn’t miss her that much and steak and wine and sex with Meredith seemed like a pretty good end to an insane day to him.
“Well, you’d know if you bothered to return any one of my phone calls.” She raises her eyebrows at him expectantly and blatantly ignores Meredith. She finds the other woman a bit of a joke. After a few moments of pausing, she turns to Meredith with a condescending look and tone and offers her her hand. “Hi. I’m Addison Shepherd.”
Derek glares at her. Yes, she’s definitely in bitch mode and sure he’s been cheating on her with Meredith for two months but Meredith isn’t her best friend and she didn’t walk in on it. Meredith’s an innocent out of the three of them, she doesn’t deserve what Addison’s about to do and Derek can’t do a thing to stop it. It’s like a train wreck.
“Shepherd?” Meredith asks meekly, hoping it’s a big joke. Her eyes waver between Addison and Derek. It’s a stupid question and she should’ve known. Derek told her nothing about his decision to come to Seattle and live in a trailer; she’s usually the kind of girl who suspects that something’s going to go wrong at any moment with any relationship and his lack of personal background information should’ve thrown up a contingent of red flags and would have if she hadn’t been blinded by his smile and hair and the way he cared about her like no one else ever had.
Addison nods. “And you must be the woman who’s been screwing my husband.” She feels awful the minute she says it - she’s usually not that bitchy when she’s being bitchy - but her lover made a point of it that her last sight of him would be his naked back on top of some trashy nurse and somewhere she’s certain she’s stockpiled a few freebies by keeping her mouth shut at other times. She looks away from Meredith and looks at Derek, who looks back at her, and she vaguely registers Meredith awkwardly looking from one to the other with her mouth open in confusion and betrayal.
“Addison, what are you doing here?” He spits out the question again after Meredith leaves, presumably to go drink herself silly. No matter how much part of him still cares for her, he can’t get over what she said to Meredith.
“Relax, Derek. I’m here for work,” she says coyly after running him through a few teasing hoops he clearly isn’t thrilled about. She has to break eye contact. She isn’t sure whether the pain in his eyes at seeing her again hurts or if it’s the total anger and rage she feels radiating from him that hurts. Still reeling from adultery, an abortion and an incredible disaster of what once seemed like it could be a good idea, she smiles and says that she’ll see him later and leaves, needing to get out of there.
Derek stares at her retreating back and closes his eyes, his shoulders drooping. He wants to hate her with every neuron and nerve and cell. She cheated on him after ten years of marriage and did it with his best friend and he doesn’t care that he wasn’t around, she still shouldn’t have done it. And then she has the audacity to show up in his city and tease about Meredith.
And he does, really. He feels badly about it, because he still loves her even though he wishes he didn’t, but he does hate her. In that instant, the moment she mocked Meredith to her face, he started hating her. And again when she joked about Meredith seeming sweet. His mother once told him that it’s possible to hate the person you love, she even said it was a necessary part of marriage sometimes, but that doesn’t make him feel any better. He sits down and rubs his face in his hands for a few minutes before deciding that he really does need to go home and lie in his bed and stare at the ceiling because sleep certainly won’t be happening.
--
She deletes all the messages on her voicemail after listening to the first three words of each (uncreative, yet predictable, the same three words each time) and mass deletes the text messages in her inbox after she sees who they’re from. Tugging on a t-shirt, Addison flops onto the hotel bed and waits for hot water to boil so she can make some tea and help her fall asleep. That she’s still on New York time should’ve taken care of that on its own, but the confrontation with Derek woke her straight up again.
The room phone rings and she jumps and answers it and tells the voice on the other end to put him through because she knows who it is, but that anyone after this should leave a message.
“Please stop calling me.” She sets the receiver down calmly and somehow falls off the bed and the tears that were prickling at her eyes now fall freely down her cheeks. The water starts to boil and she scrambles up and she shakily pours the water into a mug, barely managing to drop the tea bag in without spilling anything.
Blood on the Tracks - 03 - You're a Big Girl Now