Title: My Darkness Is Shining
Fandom: Grey's Anatomy
Characters/Pairing: Addison (/Alex)
Word Count: 320
Rating: R (ish)
Summary: Written for the
ga_fanfic Character Study Challenge. It turns out what she doesn't have paints a much more compelling picture.
Looking back, she can't quite figure out the point where everything left her behind. When the Earth kept turning, end over end on its axis, for everyone but her.
She'd had visions of marching back into Seattle, confident in her too high heels and her California glow, saving a life or several before blowing back out again with an aura of invincibility about her. It's the way it has always been after all.
And she has history on her side.
*
It turns out what she doesn't have paints a much more compelling picture.
*
There are familiar fingernails raking tracks down the centre of her spine. And she's well past pretending that she's using the interlude for anything more than the blissful distraction it hasn't quite yet become.
Well past pretending that he's interested in anything beyond his own fractured version of the same.
He tastes like bitterness.
It is a flavour she knows only too well.
*
She'd ordered him a whiskey at Joe's. Sat in the same hollowed out silence that seems to follow them around these days and watched over the lip of her own glass as he drained the contents in one go.
Eyebrows raised in arcs to match her own.
A challenge of sorts.
*
They're back at the hotel she's currently calling home. Have left puddles of discarded clothing from the doorway to the bed in the centre of the room. And even this screams of being stuck in some other time.
Some other place.
She traces circles on the back of his hand, loses herself in the symmetry of the motion and refuses to think about cherub-faced babies that will never be hers.
*
He pulls away in the aftermath. Flat on his back and burning holes into the blank-canvas ceiling above their heads.
She thinks maybe the Earth stopped turning for him too.
Once upon a time.