A Posteriori
Title: A Posteriori :: Sitting on the Moon [10/12]
Rating: NC-17. For like, three paragraphs because I was horny.
Summary: Two years in the future because this is fic and I can do that. Addison shoves Mark into a wall. Noah beats some people up. The two are very much unrelated. This is a terrible summary.
Remember what I said about markedly longer? Lies. All lies. Which is a problem because I have a lot of ground to cover and two chapters to do it in.
A Posteriori :: Eppur Si Muove
A Posteriori :: Feel Me Heaven
A Posteriori :: Dreaming of Andromeda
A Posteriori :: Dancing With Mephisto
A Posteriori :: Northern Lights
A Posteriori :: Invisible Love
A Posteriori :: Message from Io
A Posteriori :: Hello and Welcome
A Posteriori :: 20,000 Miles Above the Sea
Addison follows Mark down the hall, her heels leaving angry clicks on the cold tile behind her. They round a corner into an empty corridor and she grabs his shoulders and angrily slams him up against the wall, pinning him there. She breathes hard, seething, and her eyes burn into his. “Listen to me. You say that you still have hope, that you still believe, but I know that look in your eyes. It’s the same look you gave me when you lied to me on the stairs in Seattle, like you were admitting you lost me. And,” she shoves him back when he tries to leave, oblivious to the face he makes at the sharp pain in his shoulder, “you are not allowed to do that now. You can’t go around faking that you think she’s going to get better. I’m smarter than that, our boys are smarter than that, she’s smarter than that.” Her heart is telling her tear ducts to cry but it isn’t pride that stops them: it’s anger. “You are not allowed to give up on our little girl. I don’t care how sick she is, I don’t care what timeline they give us, I don’t care if they’re shocking her with the paddles. You do not give up on her. Do you understand?”
Mark nods and he tastes blood in his mouth because he’s biting his tongue so hard to stop his tears.
Addison shakes her head, piercing blue eyes staring him down. She watches him drop his head and stare at their feet. “Talk to me,” she says, her voice softening but she doesn’t loosen her grip.
He raises his head. “Can we not do this in the hallway?”
“You going to run away again?”
“Let me go, Addison.”
She nods and steps back and holds the door to an on call open for him, the look on her face similar to the one she gives her children when they do something wrong and need to be lectured. She locks it behind them and gestures for him to go ahead.
He turns his back to her and stares out the sliver of a window in the corner, wiping his tears and collecting himself before he says anything. “I see her get sicker every day. Every day that she sits on that transplant list and no donor comes up, I see her smile get a little weaker and her eyes get a little duller. She’s trying and she’s fighting but she knows what’s coming if she doesn’t get a donor in the next month or two and it’s really fucking hard to see that look in her eyes and not accept it myself just a little. I don’t want to think about her dying.” He feels Addison wince behind him at the word and he closes his eyes in frustration; he hates that she always uses some variant of not going to be okay, as if avoiding saying die is going to keep it from becoming a reality.
“But it’s all I can do. What do I get her for her eleventh birthday? Will she have an eleventh birthday? I want her to be okay, I want her to live. I really wish I had your kind of belief that she will be, but...they said we had two months to find a donor or it’s very likely that she won’t. We’ve been looking for a year and a half and the two matches we had went to somebody else because she wasn’t sick enough yet. I don’t know if I can believe that statistically one is going to show up in time. I want to, I really do. I want to beat the shit out of boyfriends and give her away at a wedding sometime in the very far future but...” he stops and wipes his eyes. “I haven’t given up, Addison. I just...understand the possibility that my little girl might not make it.”
Addison takes a shaky breath; she too has seen the look in Kylie’s eyes and it bothers her. No one has given up, least of all Kylie, but they all have at least heard the warnings and timelines and concerns given and expressed by her doctors and they all know that time is rapidly running out for her. She steps forward and wraps her arms around her husband’s waist and rests her cheek on his back in the dip between his shoulder blades.
“Addie...” He clasps her hands in his and squeezes tightly when he feels tears soak through his scrub top.
“She’s going to be okay.” Her voice is thick with held back emotion.
“Addison.” Mark desperately wishes that he had the same kind of utter conviction. He wants her to be okay - he needs her to be okay - but he knows that there’s a good chance she won’t be.
“I promised her, Mark.”
He turns around abruptly, breaking Addison’s hold on him. “What?”
“I promised her she was going to be okay,” she whispers guiltily, knowing that that was the one promise you were never supposed to make and every day that she watches her daughter get sicker she feels a little more like a failure because her promise gets closer and closer to breaking.
He sighs heavily, now knowing where all the passion stems from, and brushes away a tear with his thumb. “Addison…”
“I know I’m not supposed to promise anyone anything in my life other than my best but she’s my kid. I can’t exactly promise a two year-old that everyone’s going to do their best,” she says the words mockingly, “to make sure she’s okay. And when she’s eight and chemo and radiation aren’t working, I can’t exactly promise her that everyone is going to do their best to find a cocktail that does. And now, when she’s ten and completely terrified because she knows that now her life depends on someone else, I’m not going to tell her that everyone is going to do their best to find a member of a statistical sliver of the population for her. That’s not good enough.” She raises her head and locks her eyes on his. “I’m sick of everyone promising to do only their best. It’s a back door to make it okay for failure, give excuses. Sorry, my best couldn’t save your three month-premature baby; it just wasn’t possible. Sorry, my best couldn’t fully fix the scars; the damage was too deep...she’s my kid, dammit!”
Mark catches her before she collapses to the floor, fully breaking apart. In the thirty years they’ve known each other, he’s seen her cry countless times but completely crack only twice. The first was the night Derek left and the second was the night they found out Kylie was sick. He hates watching it, hates seeing her body shake and heave, hates listening to her sob, hates feeling her tears soak through his shirt and wet his skin. He hates how she needs to be coached through breathing and calmed down from a panic attack, hates holding her hair back after she’s cried so much she gets sick. It’s devastating for him to watch her curl into a defenseless fetal position and weep when there’s nothing he can do but hug her and hold her and sometimes he isn’t sure how much that helps.
“She’s my kid,” she chokes out repeatedly between sobs and clutches at his shirt, grabbing the fabric in her tight fists.
Unsure whether he’s crying for his wife, for his daughter or for himself, Mark lets his tears flow too. He tries to find some comfort, whether in her scent hidden under the deep layer of hospital smell or her hair against his cheek or her embrace or just the way she feels in his arms but he can’t. And he cries a little harder because he can always, always find at least a tiny ounce of comfort when he needs it but now he can’t and he knows just how hard the woman he loves has broken.
--
“Hey, kiddo.” Addison smiles at her daughter. Her voice is still a little hoarse from her breakdown earlier in the week and she’s still sore from shaking that much (and her abs probably won’t need a workout for a while) but her smile is genuine. “How are you feeling?”
“I’m running a marathon tomorrow.” Kylie smiles proudly. She’s been waiting all day for one of her parents to come upstairs and ask her that simply so she could answer with the prepared marathon line.
Unphased, Addison grins and sits down next to her. “Good luck with that.”
“Is there any chance you can sneak me some food that has flavor? This stuff,” she gestures to the half-eaten hospital lunch, “is making me worse.”
“You want to try sneaking food past them?” Addison gestures at the collection of doctors and nurses out in the hallway.
“If I were allowed out of this stupid place, I would.”
“Kylie.”
“Fix it! And don’t tell me that it’s best for me. You get to go outside, you get to eat real food, you get to take ten steps and not need a nap. I want a normal life.”
“Kylie, normal life doesn’t exist.”
“Yeah, well, this is definitely more not normal than anything else. I fresh air, I want a fucking window open.”
Addison clenches her fists and makes it a point to talk to Noah and Dylan about cleaning up their language. “Kylie. No, shush, my turn. I’d steal you out of here in the middle of the night if I knew that there was no risk of anything. I want you home so badly, kid. I want you to get better. And it’s awful, but the only way for you to get better is to be cooped up in here.”
Kylie fights back a wave of nausea and opens her mouth to say you promised me I would be okay but she doesn’t. She sees the guilt in her mother’s eyes and decides that it’s best for her to keep that one eternally silent.
--
Addison closes her eyes and pushes all thoughts of everything but her husband and how good he’s making her feel out of her head. She bites her lip against a series of whimpers as his tongue flicks against her clit and his fingers twist and curl inside of her. He surprised her in the bathroom while she was brushing her teeth by sucking on her neck and swirling his tongue around her earlobe while his fingers teased at the edge of her pajama pants. She had quickly finished and within seconds she was kissing him with minty fresh breath and they were tumbling toward the bed. Ever since Kylie was in the hospital the first time, they’ve made it a point to keep sex regularly though they’ve learned not to bother if the mood isn’t there. Lately it seems that one of them always has to remember that they should be doing it, but it’s no less magical and the healing powers are still there. Mark sucks messily on her clit and she opens her mouth in a silent moan as she comes.
He likes watching her smile hazily in the afterglow, the mussed hair and post-orgasmic eyes and the huskily whispered thank you are some of the best things about sex for him. He usually waits for a while, telling her that he wants to let her relearn to breathe and regain the ability to move again and that’s partially it, but it’s also because he loves the way she looks just after she comes. Her lips capture his as he slides up to hold her and, at the wiggle of her hips, he knows what she wants and he fluidly slips into her, knowing he’ll get to watch her soon enough.
“Mark...” she whispers into his neck, breathless as he shifts himself to thrust deeper into her.
“Open your eyes, Addison.” He brushes a kiss against the outside corner of one and then locks his eyes onto hers as he slides a hand between them to tease her clit.
“Oh,” she whimpers, trying to keep her eyes open. He breath quickens when he brings her just to the edge and holds her there.
He smiles and, feeling himself hit the edge too, kisses her hard to swallow her screams as he rubs her clit just right and throws her over with him.
“Thank you,” they murmur at the same time once they’ve both found their voices. Laughing, they kiss quietly and cuddle for a few moments longer, enjoying the feel of their skin sticking to each other and the goose bumps caused by a fingertip on an exposed shoulder. Right before they fall asleep, they wake up just enough to find and pull on pajamas and tumble back into bed together, Addison’s head fitting right on Mark’s shoulder and his arms fitting perfectly around her back.
--
“Mom?” Needing some help on his chemistry homework, Noah hops down the last step to find his mother. He catches sight of her sitting on a stool in the kitchen with her back to him, her head buried in her arms on the counter. At fifteen, he finds himself mostly complaining about girls and not understanding them and he doesn’t have a clue what to do when one of his girl friends loops her arms around him in a hug and cries because her mom said something mean and he technically isn’t supposed to get along with his parents but this is his mother and he’s a total momma’s boy and his sister is really sick. So instead of going back upstairs and making up the answer and willingly getting it wrong, he steps forward and calls again.
Addison sits up and wipes her eyes and tries to pretend like she wasn’t just crying. “Hey.”
“What’s wrong?” He looks down at the floor and shuffles his feet before looking up again. “That’s a really dumb question, isn’t it?”
She sighs heavily and nods. “I’m sorry, Noah.”
“For what?”
She smiles softly. “You had to grow up faster than you should. I’m sorry.” She sighs and swallows.
Noah shrugs. He’s thought about it, compared his life to the life of his friends, and he doesn’t think he’s missed out on a whole lot. There’s more responsibility, especially now that Kylie’s back in the hospital, but he still got to play Little League and go to baseball games with his dad and learn about sex from the lunch table crowd at the age of nine. “Is she gonna be okay?” His voice is soft. Addison and Mark have done their best to keep him and Dylan informed and he knows that they’re on a desperate hunt for a bone marrow donor since no one they know is a match but he’s pretty sure they’re holding back. “Be honest.”
Addison takes a long shaky breath. “I don’t know. I hope so. But at this point...” she bites her lip and shakes her head and stares at the ground a moment before she looks up at her eldest again. “I have no idea.” She watches Noah process the uncertainty and her heart hurts when he drops his gaze and balls his hands into fists in an effort to hold back the emotion. It amazes her how fiercely protective he is of his younger sister but she knows that it hurts him so much more because of that. Sliding off of her stool, she takes a few steps toward him.
Noah shakes his head. “I’m fine,” he says, his voice lending no support to his words.
Addison smiles softly. “I won’t tell anyone.”
Taking a deep breath, he relinquishes control and gives up trying to pretend that he won’t cry or fall apart and steps into his mother’s embrace. He tries to hold back at least half of his tears but then she presses a kiss to his temple and reassures him she really won’t tell anyone about this and he buries his head in her shoulder and welcomes her comfort. His status as a star varsity linebacker forgives any moderately uncool traits so he’s allowed to willingly admit that his little sister is one of his best friends. And he’s completely terrified of losing her.
“I love you,” Addison says quietly, hugging him tightly as she rubs his back and holds onto him long after he’s settled. She needs to know that her hugs can still heal something.
“I love you too.” He sniffles and wipes his eyes. He doesn’t want to let go, but he’s hungry and food doesn’t exist within his mom’s hug.
She cups his cheeks and kisses his forehead. “Takeout Chinese?”
“Yeah.”
--
“How’s Dylan?” Addison pulls her pajama top over her head and yawns.
Mark pokes his head out of the bathroom, toothpaste halfway to the toothbrush. “What?”
She shrugs. “He’s just so quiet. I wondered if he’d said anything to you.” While Noah immediately looks to Addison, Dylan instinctively heads for Mark for comfort or a partner-in-crime.
Mark thinks as he brushes his teeth. “No,” he says after he spits into the sink. “Why?”
“I promised I wouldn’t tell, but Noah fell apart on me tonight. And if a fifteen year-old jock can cry that hard, I’m concerned about the thirteen year-old geek.”
“I’ll talk to him.”
--
“Hey, buddy.” Mark knocks lightly and then sits down on the spare chair in his son’s room and decides to ignore the rapid closing of IM windows.
“Hi, Dad.” He turns around in his chair and smiles at Mark but immediately pretends to be intently focused on tightening the screws in his glasses, hoping that his father won’t ask him what he thinks he’s about to.
Mark purses his lips and nods and stares at his clasped hands and the floor. “How are you doing about Kylie?” He asks quietly, deciding to forgo to general question and focus on the specific.
Dylan abruptly stops working on his glasses but stays completely silent. He tries his best not to think about it, to go throughout his day as normally as he can without having the My Sister Is Dying cloud over his head. He gets picked on a lot for being smart and awkward and he hasn’t quite grown into his body yet so girls don’t pay any attention to him and he doesn’t want to add any more reasons to the list of why people tease him and he’s positive that moping around and having feelings would definitely qualify. He gets to visit her on the weekends and for a few days during the week but he still misses her and definitely misses her complaining when she loses miserably to him in chess.
“Dylan?” Mark prompts.
He shakes his head. “People make fun of me because I’m smart and I’m not cool. I want them to stop bothering me.”
Mark sighs, hearing the emotion behind his son’s words and able to fill in the blanks himself. “Because if they stop bothering you, you’ll be able to focus on Kylie more.”
He nods.
“Do your friends know about Kylie?”
He nods again.
“Get together and gang up on the other guys. Stand up.”
“Oh, that’ll work.”
Mark counts to ten. “You’re not staging a revolt. You’re telling people that your sister is incredibly sick, has two months to find a bone marrow donor or she’s got maybe six months left, so it would be nice if they backed off. Back-up is always nice.”
--
“Okay. When I said to stand up to the other guys? I didn’t mean hit them.” Mark stares angrily at Dylan.
“I didn’t do it!” He protests loudly.
“Dylan...” he starts to scold.
“Uh, Mr. Sloan?” The principal speaks up from the other side of the room before Mark can get any angrier. “He didn’t.”
“Then who the hell did?”
The principal looks across to a corner of the room Mark hadn’t noticed.
“I did.” Noah says, his voice an odd combination of pride and regret.
Mark shakes his head at his oldest son. “Can I take them home?”
The principal sighs in relief. “Please.”
--
“What on earth made you think that it’s okay to hit people?” Addison shouts across the kitchen at Noah.
“Mom...”
“No,” she glares, “do not Mom me. Not right now. You broke one guy’s nose and gave two others black eyes. That is not acceptable.”
“Oh, like Dylan could’ve held that one on his own. No offense,” he offers an aside to his younger brother who simply mutters “it’s the truth” and shrugs. “All he was trying to do was to tell them to back the fuck...”
“Language.”
“...off because he’d rather put energy into dealing with his sister than dealing with people who don’t have half the brain he does.”
Addison shifts her gaze to Dylan, asking for an explanation.
“People make fun of me. I don’t want to deal with that shit while Kylie’s sick.”
“Time out.” Addison makes the universal sign. “Enough with the swearing, you guys. I don’t care what you say at school, keep it clean here at least until you go to college.”
“You gonna institute an Underage Cursing Jar?” Noah mocks but then grimaces, immediately regretting it.
“Right next to the Inappropriate Back Talking Jar.”
He mumbles that he's sorry.
“Noah Alexander, I am not happy with you right now. You are my son, I love you dearly, but goddammit. You do not hit people. Invoke your older brother privileges in some other fashion. Two months, no driving except for your scheduled in-cars. Excuse me; I’m going to answer the phone. Mark.” She gives him a pointed look to continue the conversation. He’ll easily talk her into reducing the sentence to one month or a few weeks simply on sanity and that it would greatly help if Noah got his driver’s license at or around his sixteenth birthday but for now the threat stands.
“Hello?” Addison glares at the three men, telling them with her eyes to shut the hell up while she’s on the phone. She wants Mark to do a fatherly lecture, but doesn’t want it to be loud.
Mark continues the discussion in a hushed but firm whisper, halfway listening to Addison’s half of the conversation. At her silence a few minutes in, he looks up.
Addison’s face goes blank and she grips the counter so hard her knuckles turn white. She shakes her head at Mark, waving him off as she closes her eyes and processes what she just heard. “Say that again.” A smile of relief slowly washes over her face and tears spring to her eyes. “Thank you,” she breathes. “I...” At a loss for words, she simply shakes her head. “Thank you.” She smiles even wider and bites her lip. “Yeah. We’ll see you tomorrow.” She opens her eyes as she hangs up the phone and sets it on the counter.
“What?” Noah asks when no one else does.
“We have a donor.”
A Posteriori :: The Alchemist
Rating: NC-17. For like, three paragraphs because I was horny.
Summary: Two years in the future because this is fic and I can do that. Addison shoves Mark into a wall. Noah beats some people up. The two are very much unrelated. This is a terrible summary.
Remember what I said about markedly longer? Lies. All lies. Which is a problem because I have a lot of ground to cover and two chapters to do it in.
A Posteriori :: Eppur Si Muove
A Posteriori :: Feel Me Heaven
A Posteriori :: Dreaming of Andromeda
A Posteriori :: Dancing With Mephisto
A Posteriori :: Northern Lights
A Posteriori :: Invisible Love
A Posteriori :: Message from Io
A Posteriori :: Hello and Welcome
A Posteriori :: 20,000 Miles Above the Sea
Addison follows Mark down the hall, her heels leaving angry clicks on the cold tile behind her. They round a corner into an empty corridor and she grabs his shoulders and angrily slams him up against the wall, pinning him there. She breathes hard, seething, and her eyes burn into his. “Listen to me. You say that you still have hope, that you still believe, but I know that look in your eyes. It’s the same look you gave me when you lied to me on the stairs in Seattle, like you were admitting you lost me. And,” she shoves him back when he tries to leave, oblivious to the face he makes at the sharp pain in his shoulder, “you are not allowed to do that now. You can’t go around faking that you think she’s going to get better. I’m smarter than that, our boys are smarter than that, she’s smarter than that.” Her heart is telling her tear ducts to cry but it isn’t pride that stops them: it’s anger. “You are not allowed to give up on our little girl. I don’t care how sick she is, I don’t care what timeline they give us, I don’t care if they’re shocking her with the paddles. You do not give up on her. Do you understand?”
Mark nods and he tastes blood in his mouth because he’s biting his tongue so hard to stop his tears.
Addison shakes her head, piercing blue eyes staring him down. She watches him drop his head and stare at their feet. “Talk to me,” she says, her voice softening but she doesn’t loosen her grip.
He raises his head. “Can we not do this in the hallway?”
“You going to run away again?”
“Let me go, Addison.”
She nods and steps back and holds the door to an on call open for him, the look on her face similar to the one she gives her children when they do something wrong and need to be lectured. She locks it behind them and gestures for him to go ahead.
He turns his back to her and stares out the sliver of a window in the corner, wiping his tears and collecting himself before he says anything. “I see her get sicker every day. Every day that she sits on that transplant list and no donor comes up, I see her smile get a little weaker and her eyes get a little duller. She’s trying and she’s fighting but she knows what’s coming if she doesn’t get a donor in the next month or two and it’s really fucking hard to see that look in her eyes and not accept it myself just a little. I don’t want to think about her dying.” He feels Addison wince behind him at the word and he closes his eyes in frustration; he hates that she always uses some variant of not going to be okay, as if avoiding saying die is going to keep it from becoming a reality.
“But it’s all I can do. What do I get her for her eleventh birthday? Will she have an eleventh birthday? I want her to be okay, I want her to live. I really wish I had your kind of belief that she will be, but...they said we had two months to find a donor or it’s very likely that she won’t. We’ve been looking for a year and a half and the two matches we had went to somebody else because she wasn’t sick enough yet. I don’t know if I can believe that statistically one is going to show up in time. I want to, I really do. I want to beat the shit out of boyfriends and give her away at a wedding sometime in the very far future but...” he stops and wipes his eyes. “I haven’t given up, Addison. I just...understand the possibility that my little girl might not make it.”
Addison takes a shaky breath; she too has seen the look in Kylie’s eyes and it bothers her. No one has given up, least of all Kylie, but they all have at least heard the warnings and timelines and concerns given and expressed by her doctors and they all know that time is rapidly running out for her. She steps forward and wraps her arms around her husband’s waist and rests her cheek on his back in the dip between his shoulder blades.
“Addie...” He clasps her hands in his and squeezes tightly when he feels tears soak through his scrub top.
“She’s going to be okay.” Her voice is thick with held back emotion.
“Addison.” Mark desperately wishes that he had the same kind of utter conviction. He wants her to be okay - he needs her to be okay - but he knows that there’s a good chance she won’t be.
“I promised her, Mark.”
He turns around abruptly, breaking Addison’s hold on him. “What?”
“I promised her she was going to be okay,” she whispers guiltily, knowing that that was the one promise you were never supposed to make and every day that she watches her daughter get sicker she feels a little more like a failure because her promise gets closer and closer to breaking.
He sighs heavily, now knowing where all the passion stems from, and brushes away a tear with his thumb. “Addison…”
“I know I’m not supposed to promise anyone anything in my life other than my best but she’s my kid. I can’t exactly promise a two year-old that everyone’s going to do their best,” she says the words mockingly, “to make sure she’s okay. And when she’s eight and chemo and radiation aren’t working, I can’t exactly promise her that everyone is going to do their best to find a cocktail that does. And now, when she’s ten and completely terrified because she knows that now her life depends on someone else, I’m not going to tell her that everyone is going to do their best to find a member of a statistical sliver of the population for her. That’s not good enough.” She raises her head and locks her eyes on his. “I’m sick of everyone promising to do only their best. It’s a back door to make it okay for failure, give excuses. Sorry, my best couldn’t save your three month-premature baby; it just wasn’t possible. Sorry, my best couldn’t fully fix the scars; the damage was too deep...she’s my kid, dammit!”
Mark catches her before she collapses to the floor, fully breaking apart. In the thirty years they’ve known each other, he’s seen her cry countless times but completely crack only twice. The first was the night Derek left and the second was the night they found out Kylie was sick. He hates watching it, hates seeing her body shake and heave, hates listening to her sob, hates feeling her tears soak through his shirt and wet his skin. He hates how she needs to be coached through breathing and calmed down from a panic attack, hates holding her hair back after she’s cried so much she gets sick. It’s devastating for him to watch her curl into a defenseless fetal position and weep when there’s nothing he can do but hug her and hold her and sometimes he isn’t sure how much that helps.
“She’s my kid,” she chokes out repeatedly between sobs and clutches at his shirt, grabbing the fabric in her tight fists.
Unsure whether he’s crying for his wife, for his daughter or for himself, Mark lets his tears flow too. He tries to find some comfort, whether in her scent hidden under the deep layer of hospital smell or her hair against his cheek or her embrace or just the way she feels in his arms but he can’t. And he cries a little harder because he can always, always find at least a tiny ounce of comfort when he needs it but now he can’t and he knows just how hard the woman he loves has broken.
--
“Hey, kiddo.” Addison smiles at her daughter. Her voice is still a little hoarse from her breakdown earlier in the week and she’s still sore from shaking that much (and her abs probably won’t need a workout for a while) but her smile is genuine. “How are you feeling?”
“I’m running a marathon tomorrow.” Kylie smiles proudly. She’s been waiting all day for one of her parents to come upstairs and ask her that simply so she could answer with the prepared marathon line.
Unphased, Addison grins and sits down next to her. “Good luck with that.”
“Is there any chance you can sneak me some food that has flavor? This stuff,” she gestures to the half-eaten hospital lunch, “is making me worse.”
“You want to try sneaking food past them?” Addison gestures at the collection of doctors and nurses out in the hallway.
“If I were allowed out of this stupid place, I would.”
“Kylie.”
“Fix it! And don’t tell me that it’s best for me. You get to go outside, you get to eat real food, you get to take ten steps and not need a nap. I want a normal life.”
“Kylie, normal life doesn’t exist.”
“Yeah, well, this is definitely more not normal than anything else. I fresh air, I want a fucking window open.”
Addison clenches her fists and makes it a point to talk to Noah and Dylan about cleaning up their language. “Kylie. No, shush, my turn. I’d steal you out of here in the middle of the night if I knew that there was no risk of anything. I want you home so badly, kid. I want you to get better. And it’s awful, but the only way for you to get better is to be cooped up in here.”
Kylie fights back a wave of nausea and opens her mouth to say you promised me I would be okay but she doesn’t. She sees the guilt in her mother’s eyes and decides that it’s best for her to keep that one eternally silent.
--
Addison closes her eyes and pushes all thoughts of everything but her husband and how good he’s making her feel out of her head. She bites her lip against a series of whimpers as his tongue flicks against her clit and his fingers twist and curl inside of her. He surprised her in the bathroom while she was brushing her teeth by sucking on her neck and swirling his tongue around her earlobe while his fingers teased at the edge of her pajama pants. She had quickly finished and within seconds she was kissing him with minty fresh breath and they were tumbling toward the bed. Ever since Kylie was in the hospital the first time, they’ve made it a point to keep sex regularly though they’ve learned not to bother if the mood isn’t there. Lately it seems that one of them always has to remember that they should be doing it, but it’s no less magical and the healing powers are still there. Mark sucks messily on her clit and she opens her mouth in a silent moan as she comes.
He likes watching her smile hazily in the afterglow, the mussed hair and post-orgasmic eyes and the huskily whispered thank you are some of the best things about sex for him. He usually waits for a while, telling her that he wants to let her relearn to breathe and regain the ability to move again and that’s partially it, but it’s also because he loves the way she looks just after she comes. Her lips capture his as he slides up to hold her and, at the wiggle of her hips, he knows what she wants and he fluidly slips into her, knowing he’ll get to watch her soon enough.
“Mark...” she whispers into his neck, breathless as he shifts himself to thrust deeper into her.
“Open your eyes, Addison.” He brushes a kiss against the outside corner of one and then locks his eyes onto hers as he slides a hand between them to tease her clit.
“Oh,” she whimpers, trying to keep her eyes open. He breath quickens when he brings her just to the edge and holds her there.
He smiles and, feeling himself hit the edge too, kisses her hard to swallow her screams as he rubs her clit just right and throws her over with him.
“Thank you,” they murmur at the same time once they’ve both found their voices. Laughing, they kiss quietly and cuddle for a few moments longer, enjoying the feel of their skin sticking to each other and the goose bumps caused by a fingertip on an exposed shoulder. Right before they fall asleep, they wake up just enough to find and pull on pajamas and tumble back into bed together, Addison’s head fitting right on Mark’s shoulder and his arms fitting perfectly around her back.
--
“Mom?” Needing some help on his chemistry homework, Noah hops down the last step to find his mother. He catches sight of her sitting on a stool in the kitchen with her back to him, her head buried in her arms on the counter. At fifteen, he finds himself mostly complaining about girls and not understanding them and he doesn’t have a clue what to do when one of his girl friends loops her arms around him in a hug and cries because her mom said something mean and he technically isn’t supposed to get along with his parents but this is his mother and he’s a total momma’s boy and his sister is really sick. So instead of going back upstairs and making up the answer and willingly getting it wrong, he steps forward and calls again.
Addison sits up and wipes her eyes and tries to pretend like she wasn’t just crying. “Hey.”
“What’s wrong?” He looks down at the floor and shuffles his feet before looking up again. “That’s a really dumb question, isn’t it?”
She sighs heavily and nods. “I’m sorry, Noah.”
“For what?”
She smiles softly. “You had to grow up faster than you should. I’m sorry.” She sighs and swallows.
Noah shrugs. He’s thought about it, compared his life to the life of his friends, and he doesn’t think he’s missed out on a whole lot. There’s more responsibility, especially now that Kylie’s back in the hospital, but he still got to play Little League and go to baseball games with his dad and learn about sex from the lunch table crowd at the age of nine. “Is she gonna be okay?” His voice is soft. Addison and Mark have done their best to keep him and Dylan informed and he knows that they’re on a desperate hunt for a bone marrow donor since no one they know is a match but he’s pretty sure they’re holding back. “Be honest.”
Addison takes a long shaky breath. “I don’t know. I hope so. But at this point...” she bites her lip and shakes her head and stares at the ground a moment before she looks up at her eldest again. “I have no idea.” She watches Noah process the uncertainty and her heart hurts when he drops his gaze and balls his hands into fists in an effort to hold back the emotion. It amazes her how fiercely protective he is of his younger sister but she knows that it hurts him so much more because of that. Sliding off of her stool, she takes a few steps toward him.
Noah shakes his head. “I’m fine,” he says, his voice lending no support to his words.
Addison smiles softly. “I won’t tell anyone.”
Taking a deep breath, he relinquishes control and gives up trying to pretend that he won’t cry or fall apart and steps into his mother’s embrace. He tries to hold back at least half of his tears but then she presses a kiss to his temple and reassures him she really won’t tell anyone about this and he buries his head in her shoulder and welcomes her comfort. His status as a star varsity linebacker forgives any moderately uncool traits so he’s allowed to willingly admit that his little sister is one of his best friends. And he’s completely terrified of losing her.
“I love you,” Addison says quietly, hugging him tightly as she rubs his back and holds onto him long after he’s settled. She needs to know that her hugs can still heal something.
“I love you too.” He sniffles and wipes his eyes. He doesn’t want to let go, but he’s hungry and food doesn’t exist within his mom’s hug.
She cups his cheeks and kisses his forehead. “Takeout Chinese?”
“Yeah.”
--
“How’s Dylan?” Addison pulls her pajama top over her head and yawns.
Mark pokes his head out of the bathroom, toothpaste halfway to the toothbrush. “What?”
She shrugs. “He’s just so quiet. I wondered if he’d said anything to you.” While Noah immediately looks to Addison, Dylan instinctively heads for Mark for comfort or a partner-in-crime.
Mark thinks as he brushes his teeth. “No,” he says after he spits into the sink. “Why?”
“I promised I wouldn’t tell, but Noah fell apart on me tonight. And if a fifteen year-old jock can cry that hard, I’m concerned about the thirteen year-old geek.”
“I’ll talk to him.”
--
“Hey, buddy.” Mark knocks lightly and then sits down on the spare chair in his son’s room and decides to ignore the rapid closing of IM windows.
“Hi, Dad.” He turns around in his chair and smiles at Mark but immediately pretends to be intently focused on tightening the screws in his glasses, hoping that his father won’t ask him what he thinks he’s about to.
Mark purses his lips and nods and stares at his clasped hands and the floor. “How are you doing about Kylie?” He asks quietly, deciding to forgo to general question and focus on the specific.
Dylan abruptly stops working on his glasses but stays completely silent. He tries his best not to think about it, to go throughout his day as normally as he can without having the My Sister Is Dying cloud over his head. He gets picked on a lot for being smart and awkward and he hasn’t quite grown into his body yet so girls don’t pay any attention to him and he doesn’t want to add any more reasons to the list of why people tease him and he’s positive that moping around and having feelings would definitely qualify. He gets to visit her on the weekends and for a few days during the week but he still misses her and definitely misses her complaining when she loses miserably to him in chess.
“Dylan?” Mark prompts.
He shakes his head. “People make fun of me because I’m smart and I’m not cool. I want them to stop bothering me.”
Mark sighs, hearing the emotion behind his son’s words and able to fill in the blanks himself. “Because if they stop bothering you, you’ll be able to focus on Kylie more.”
He nods.
“Do your friends know about Kylie?”
He nods again.
“Get together and gang up on the other guys. Stand up.”
“Oh, that’ll work.”
Mark counts to ten. “You’re not staging a revolt. You’re telling people that your sister is incredibly sick, has two months to find a bone marrow donor or she’s got maybe six months left, so it would be nice if they backed off. Back-up is always nice.”
--
“Okay. When I said to stand up to the other guys? I didn’t mean hit them.” Mark stares angrily at Dylan.
“I didn’t do it!” He protests loudly.
“Dylan...” he starts to scold.
“Uh, Mr. Sloan?” The principal speaks up from the other side of the room before Mark can get any angrier. “He didn’t.”
“Then who the hell did?”
The principal looks across to a corner of the room Mark hadn’t noticed.
“I did.” Noah says, his voice an odd combination of pride and regret.
Mark shakes his head at his oldest son. “Can I take them home?”
The principal sighs in relief. “Please.”
--
“What on earth made you think that it’s okay to hit people?” Addison shouts across the kitchen at Noah.
“Mom...”
“No,” she glares, “do not Mom me. Not right now. You broke one guy’s nose and gave two others black eyes. That is not acceptable.”
“Oh, like Dylan could’ve held that one on his own. No offense,” he offers an aside to his younger brother who simply mutters “it’s the truth” and shrugs. “All he was trying to do was to tell them to back the fuck...”
“Language.”
“...off because he’d rather put energy into dealing with his sister than dealing with people who don’t have half the brain he does.”
Addison shifts her gaze to Dylan, asking for an explanation.
“People make fun of me. I don’t want to deal with that shit while Kylie’s sick.”
“Time out.” Addison makes the universal sign. “Enough with the swearing, you guys. I don’t care what you say at school, keep it clean here at least until you go to college.”
“You gonna institute an Underage Cursing Jar?” Noah mocks but then grimaces, immediately regretting it.
“Right next to the Inappropriate Back Talking Jar.”
He mumbles that he's sorry.
“Noah Alexander, I am not happy with you right now. You are my son, I love you dearly, but goddammit. You do not hit people. Invoke your older brother privileges in some other fashion. Two months, no driving except for your scheduled in-cars. Excuse me; I’m going to answer the phone. Mark.” She gives him a pointed look to continue the conversation. He’ll easily talk her into reducing the sentence to one month or a few weeks simply on sanity and that it would greatly help if Noah got his driver’s license at or around his sixteenth birthday but for now the threat stands.
“Hello?” Addison glares at the three men, telling them with her eyes to shut the hell up while she’s on the phone. She wants Mark to do a fatherly lecture, but doesn’t want it to be loud.
Mark continues the discussion in a hushed but firm whisper, halfway listening to Addison’s half of the conversation. At her silence a few minutes in, he looks up.
Addison’s face goes blank and she grips the counter so hard her knuckles turn white. She shakes her head at Mark, waving him off as she closes her eyes and processes what she just heard. “Say that again.” A smile of relief slowly washes over her face and tears spring to her eyes. “Thank you,” she breathes. “I...” At a loss for words, she simply shakes her head. “Thank you.” She smiles even wider and bites her lip. “Yeah. We’ll see you tomorrow.” She opens her eyes as she hangs up the phone and sets it on the counter.
“What?” Noah asks when no one else does.
“We have a donor.”
A Posteriori :: The Alchemist