FIC: All I Really Want
Title: All I Really Want
Author: Amy/fox1013 (alexia@innergeekdom.net) and Kat/ lone_lilly (ktblle@gmail.com)
Fandom: Grey's Anatomy. Duh.
Spoilers: We grab details stuff from the finale, but it's not necessarily spoilery for it.
Summary: This could get messy, but you don't seem to mind. (Meredith/Addison, Meredith/Addison/Derek)
Rating: NC17, man
Notes: Cross-posted all over. Title, summary, and cut tag from various Alanis Morissette songs. Because if anyone loved Alanis? It was teenaged Meredith Grey. Seriously.
4,000 words exactly
Meredith wears costumes like other people wear their own skin. It isn't her fault, really. She never woke up and said "I think today I'm going to play a role" and started acting. It's just one of those things that happens to her. The alternative to disappearance, Meredith thinks, is reinvention, and out of two crappy choices, it's got to be the preferable one. So one day she has pink hair. So one day she decides to be a doctor. So one day she lets two of her coworkers live with her. So one day she sleeps with her boss.
So one day she sleeps with his wife.
That's pretty much how Meredith rolls, these days. You take a catalyst, and then you offer her a list of options. And she'll always, always, always choose the worst one. It's never about ethics, or morals, or logic. It's always about getting what she wants, when she wants it. And it always, always backfires horribly.
The thing is, it's not planned, or malicious, or anything like that. Meredith can't blame any one or any thing, not Addison or the drinks at Joe's or the things Derek said at work that morning. They're all factors, but no one's at fault, not really. It's just what the day decided for her. Some people wake up to see what the weather's going to be like. Meredith wakes up to discover who she's going to be that morning.
She thought it might be a disease, once. Or a disorder. One of those mental psychoses that happen to pretty girls who don't know how good they have it. Except it's not MPD and it's not schizophrenia. It's just being a fourteen-year-old girl, really. Except that it started when Meredith was about six, and it doesn't show any signs of stopping.
Cristina said once that she's never had a problem answering the question of what she wants to be when she grows up, because she's always known: surgeon. She's going to be a surgeon. She is a surgeon. Cristina was probably saying that in diapers. Out loud, while everyone else was gurgling in baby talk. She was probably spelling it, too.
Meredith? Meredith didn't even know about growing up. Not just when she was little; they'd ask her if she wanted the red or the blue crayon, and she'd grab both because she was never sure if today was a day for flames or for sky. And not as she got older, either. They'd ask her what classes she wanted to take in high school and she'd shrug, and they'd put her in the hard classes so she took them and did well because, well, what else was she going to do? They'd ask her what college she wanted to go to and she'd shrug, so her guidance counselor said apply to Dartmouth early and she did and she went and she did fine. No one asked her what she wanted to do after college; she was, after all, Ellis Grey's daughter. So she went to med school. And then she got an internship. Exactly the way it was supposed to work, except maybe somewhere in there something went wrong, because this was what was supposed to make her happy, and she's pretty sure happy doesn't feel like this.
Some days, Meredith wants to blow off the hospital and go to work at a rodeo or a police station or a magical castle. But it doesn't work like that when you're not six anymore.
And the thing about Meredith is that she never knows she doesn't want to do something anymore until she's in the middle of it and getting out is nearly impossible.
Derek. George. Denny's LVAD wire.
But because she's Ellis Grey's daughter, everyone expects her to have the right answers. Which is sort of funny, she thinks, but not ha-ha funny, but rather drink-yourself-silly-with-tequila funny. Because Meredith? Meredith Grey? Never has the right answers. Meredith has the complete opposite of right answers.
Which brings her back to the Addison thing.
She'll blame it on the alcohol and the three small children they couldn't save in the O.R. but what it really boils down to is that Meredith wanted to know what it was like to be Addison for just a moment, and this is the moment she wants to have.
Addison is the woman Derek chose. She has great hair and a great rack and Meredith's pretty sure she's never walked around with a Hello Kitty band-aid on her face. Addison talks in the operating room and people listen. She's one of the best doctors at Seattle Grace. Hell, Addison's even the sort of daughter Ellis Grey could be proud of. In short, she's pretty much everything Meredith Grey wakes up pretending to be.
There isn't a single detail about Addison that Meredith isn't filing away somewhere. Not the hair color- that's too obvious- or even the perfume, but there are little things Meredith can do, tiny pieces she can take in for herself that maybe no one will notice have nothing to do with the Meredith they knew yesterday. But then, of course they won't. People around her always seem to think that she's one person, not a bunch of personalities flowing between each other to form this whole that's not really whole, because secretly? Meredith's kind of empty.
So maybe doing this, fucking Addison (and liking it), is just a way to fill a hole in her life, for a little while. For a day, or an hour, or a second. Maybe it's just part of Meredith's never-ending quest to find some way to make herself into one cohesive person.
Except usually, those things aren't nearly this fun.
Dying her hair burned her scalp, and being a doctor was a lot of work, and sleeping with Derek had more ramifications than a one-night stand is supposed to. But sex with Addison? Exactly what it's supposed to be.
See, here's the thing about Meredith's life: every day is another choice, another chance to get it wrong. And every day she finds a way to do that, a new and more explosive way that will bring everyone down around her.
And maybe tomorrow, something, anything- Derek's reaction, Izzie's reaction, George's reaction, hell, Addison's reaction- will make today seem like a much bigger mistake than it feels like at the moment. But right now? She doesn't have that stupid sinking feeling in her stomach that happens whenever she realizes just how badly she screwed up.
And it's kind of a nice thing to not have, for once.
So, she does things to Addison that she knows will feel good because she learned them from Derek, who must have learned them from his wife. And his wife does things back to her that definitely feel good because she's been with Derek since he's been with Meredith, and then they do things to each other that feel fantastic and both forget Derek completely.
(One thing that will always be true about Meredith: she doesn't do anything half way.)
Until Meredith licks a path up Addison's still-trembling thigh and Addison pulls her up for a kiss and then the entire experience is over and Derek is very much a part of everything again.
And not just in the metaphorical elephant-in-the-corner sense, but the very real leaning against the door frame sense.
It's a true testament to the lengths Meredith's willing to go to find herself, when she manages not to even look surprised that he's caught them.
Addison doesn't fare quite as well- Meredith suddenly realizes that Addison was looking for forgiveness in her, and that backfired pretty spectacularly, there, didn't it?- and then there's Derek. Derek, who refuses to look at either of them, choosing instead to stare at the sheets underneath them and grit his teeth determinedly. Derek, who ruined ferry boats for Meredith and now can't stop seeing red.
Literally. The sheets. They're red. And Italian.
At least they're not the flannel sheets, Meredith thinks, but even she knows better than to point that out.
She's self-destructive to a decidedly pathological degree, but she isn't stupid.
The Meredith of any other day might react. Might get up, might run away, might burst into tears (that's a big one for her these days), but today's Meredith is into this and ready for more, and if letting her hormones get in front of her common sense is a crime, well, hasn't Meredith been punished enough?
Which is why she's looking at Derek like he's not just That Dick She Once Slept With, and then her gaze slides to Addison like she's not The Slutty Cheating Wife Of Her Ex, and she realizes that the ball is wholly and completely in their court. Addison would fuck her. Derek would fuck her. The question is if they're willing to share her with each other.
Derek doesn't stop glaring, but he does walk farther into the room. Addison's face is still frozen in something closely resembling shock, but she lets go of the sheet she was holding in front of herself and lets it drop to the mattress, revealing skin. And if Meredith's right there next to it, even if Derek's eyes never leave them, well, it wouldn't be right, letting that much naked be there without acknowledging it with a stroke of a finger. Or, say, maybe a tongue.
This is not the thing that yesterday's Meredith would do. It's not the thing that pick me, choose me, love me Meredith would do. It's not the kind of thing that don't-call-me-a-whore Meredith would do either, because this Meredith, the one she is right now? She is kind of a whore, but more than that, she's kind of happy with it. She still wouldn't let anyone call her one, of course- and if Derek opens his mouth and says one word to ruin it, she's going to make sure he's at Seattle Grace as a patient instead of a doctor, because she's pretty sure he could take him and then leave him sitting there injured and bleeding until she gets off - but for now, she's nothing but dirty thoughts and nerve endings and, fuck, hormones. Hormones are awesome.
Meredith's fucked a married man before- that was prom, in a nutshell- but she's never screwed a couple at the same time.
She kisses Addison. When she feels Addison's hand knotting itself in her hair, she knows she's won.
And that's the thing that really gets her hot. They thought they could put her behind them, thought they could forget her and she'd just go away. But she's fucking tired of being the Meredith that puts on a different costume everyday and hopes that it's the one that makes her unforgettable.
These two? These two are NOT going to forget her. And just to make sure they both know this, she pushes Addison back onto the bed and straddles her, drinking from her mouth until she feels Derek brush her shoulder. She takes her time ending the kiss, and when she glances at the man standing beside the bed, she does her best imitation of Their Look and isn't surprised at all to see the effect it has on him.
But this isn't about him, it's all about her, the Meredith of Today, and so after a moment, she returns her attention back to Addison.
If she wants to be Addison then she has to think like Addison and so she asks herself: What Would Addison Do? Well, for starters, she's pretty sure that Addison, beloved by all, would take advantage of the exquisitely naked pair of breasts in front of her, and so that's exactly what she does next.
Someone makes a sound of approval when she touches the tip of her tongue to Addison's nipple, and she's so far into this game she can't even tell who it was.
She swirls her tongue and sucks and then moves to the other, back and forth until Addison's panting underneath her, and Derek's taking very measured deep breaths beside them, and then she does exactly what she imagines Addison would do if Addison were in charge.
She stops. Because Addison isn't the one in charge, Meredith is, and she's sort of got a theme going now so if she's going to be running this little party the two of them need to be paying more attention to her.
So, in one fluid motion that impresses even her, she shifts so she and Addison are on their sides and she extends a hand out in invitation to Derek.
He has to participate. They both do.
Meredith's newest role is playing herself, and maybe it's the hardest role that she's ever had, because there's no rule book for her to follow except her own gut, and her gut has notoriously bad taste. But she's not doing a bad job, maybe, because Derek takes her hand and Meredith does this thing she didn't even know she could do that gets his jacket off and she's about to tear off his shirt when he does it himself instead.
Which is kind of a mood killer, but also kind of hot. It's a nice shirt. She wouldn't want it destroyed either.
Still, Meredith is a fan of naked, really, so everyone getting naked is a big plus in her world. Especially when everyone, in this case, looks like Addison and McDreamy. Which she shouldn't be thinking of him as, when she can see him, naked, he should be Derek here, but it's kind of a hard habit to break. Especially when she can't believe this is happening in real life, to her. This is the kind of thing that would happen to one of the bleached-blonde girls on Naughty Nurses 16, not to a wannabe doctor whose biggest claim to fame will always be "Do you know who her mother is?" So it's understandable, Meredith thinks, that she keeps sliding into fantasy territory, over and over again.
There are differences, of course. Little things that remind her that it's real life. Like the way that Addison's skin is so flushed that she looks sick instead of just hot, or the way that Derek's eyes look so dark they're practically twin black holes, like he's hiding something important or knows something no one else does or whatever. Or the way that she, Meredith, has hair so sweaty that it's sticking to her back. In a fantasy or a porn movie, Meredith thinks, her hair would look awesome.
But this isn't a fantasy or a porn movie, and Meredith is not a character. She is not wearing a costume. She's just Meredith, and this is just real life, and her only options right now are to give up or get off.
She doesn't think the Meredith she is today is a fan of giving up. So that means door number two for the win.
Stretching up a little, she leans closer to Derek- McDreamy? Dr. Shepherd? It was all so much easier when she didn't know his name- and smiles at him. And it's not a Meredith smile he'll recognize but it's one that seems to do the trick because he kind of groans a little and suddenly he's holding her face the way he does and his mouth is on hers.
This might possibly be the moment where any of the other Merediths might start to get cold feet. The moment she knows she doesn't want to, and her stomach starts sinking and her skin starts throbbing. Except before she can get all the way there, before she has more than a brief shock of reality, Derek's pushing her back on the bed and Addison's hands are slipping down her belly and she's sliding right back to where she wants to be.
Four hands? Four hands are way better than two, she decides, and she squirms underneath all those perfectly skilled and expensive fingers.
She pretends not to notice when Derek pushes Addison's hand away. Meredith instead turns her head to his wife, who watches all of it like it's the best performance she's seen in years (and, really, isn't it?), and it might be Derek's hand inside her but it's Addison who bites into her bottom lip so exquisitely that everything suddenly explodes inside of her.
She doesn't call out either of their names when she comes.
The weird part is how they keep touching her and kissing her, because they both know the hows and whys of her now, but neither of them seem to know what to do next and it kind of, sort of, just a little pisses her off.
The two of them are so fucking passive aggressive with everything that even though she knows that this whole night will ruin everything for all of them, she wants to fuck things up just a tiny bit more.
She wonders what would happen now, if she changed everything in the world. If she stood up, got dressed, and never looked back. Walked right from their trailer to a train, and became a rodeo clown overnight. Would that change anything? Would it make anything better? Ellis Grey's daughter, accepted to one of the top med programs on the West Coast... rodeo clown. It's almost enough to make her leave, just for the irony of it all.
But the bed's too comfortable to get up from. So she chooses the only other path she can think of.
"So are you two getting a divorce now, or what?" she asks, and Addison and Derek both turn from fire to ice, one person completely still on each side of her, and she takes the opportunity to snuggle deeper into the bed. The sheets are soft, and warm with three people's body heat by now. The dark red of the fabric stains everything she sees when she closes her eyes. She wonders if these were his favorites, after the flannel. She wonders how many of his favorite things she'll be able to destroy.
When Meredith was a freshman at Dartmouth, she was full of moments like this, lying in a bed and asking questions and trying to change the universe with these thoughts that seemed so fucking deep at the time. Okay, they were never moments exactly like this, because usually it was her and her roommate (pre-getting kicked out) and maybe a few friends, with a bottle of vodka being passed among all of them, and everyone was clothed and no one was having sex, but still. It was close. And the questions they'd asked- they were always, always questions about life and death and sin and redemption and heaven and hell and who deserved what and how they wished it would happen. Questions that, theoretically, seemed really important and deep, but practically, made her seem kind of like a sociopath.
She kind of feels like that sociopath right now. Addison and Derek are both freezing up and she doesn't care, because in her own way, she's trying to give them what they gave her. She's trying to give them a way to ask a question they didn't even know they'd been dying to ask.
Meredith doesn't know who she is, not really, but at least she knows she doesn't know. Addison doesn't know what she wants, and Derek doesn't know what he has, and that makes both of them, in a lot of ways, even dumber than Meredith. She might be the intern screwing the attendings, but they're the attendings screwing the intern and each other.
In those terms, actually, she thinks she may be the smartest one in the room.
Everything about Meredith is buzzing, and her stomach's sinking in that telltale way that she's been fighting ever since she found Addison and went home with her. It's one of those cues her body gives her when she's gone too far, but those are cues everyday Meredith takes, and today Meredith is ignoring them. And maybe tomorrow she'll wake up and realize that it wasn't sleeping with Addison that was the biggest mistake of her life, or even sleeping with Addison and Derek at once- it was stopping everything they had to bring reality into the picture.
But if there's one thing that today's Meredith specializes in, it's reality. Not a costume, not an act. And if she's forcing herself to be real, everyone else has to play the same game. They're not royalty kept in magical towers or heroes sent to save the day. They're not just a ferry boat ride from salvation. Everything has to be real, not whatever act they've chosen for the day.
"I want to fuck you both," she says. Her voice doesn't sound like her own. She sounds like one of them, she thinks, speaking in the operating room. But she keeps talking. "I want to fuck you, but not if tomorrow I'm just going to be another Mark."
She lets her words sink in and then turns to Addison first, who simply glances away and nods. Addison, she's figured out, will do anything for atonement, even fuck her husband's dirty mistress, even fuck them both. Meredith thinks that maybe being Addison isn't such a great idea after all.
So, she tilts her head and looks at Derek. Derek, who still has a possessive hand across her hip and who hasn't stopped looking at her since he entered the room, and who happens to be harder than she ever remembers him being.
It's a challenge. She's there, she's willing, she'll go through with it, but she'll be damned if he's going to forget her when it's over.
It feels to her like the moment stretches on forever, but she's always been prone to exaggerate things and, really, she's not in any hurry.
(But then she's come three times- twice with his wife, and once with the both of them- and she can afford to have a little patience. He's the one who can't.)
He takes in a breath, does not look at his wife, and says simply, "Yes."
Of course he does. She knew he would.
Which is funny- really funny, the kind of funny she could use in a story later if there were anyone in the world she could tell about this night, which there isn't, because even Cristina would laugh at her (not in the snarky but nice way she's used to, Meredith thinks, but in the "you're so fucked up you frighten even me" way that's kind of like hysteria), so it'll just be Meredith's punch line for herself- because that, right there? That's proof that she was right, and she was wrong, all at once. Because he shouldn't have agreed to this, any more than Addison should have, any more than she should have suggested it in the first place. Because that's not him being loyal to himself, that's him being loyal to this ideal of himself that he's never been but convinced himself he'll always be, and that's Addison, trying to be the wife that Derek wants, and that's her, Meredith, trying to fill a hole and trying to be herself and trying to become everyone else in the process.
Meredith watched three people die today in the hospital. Tiny kids who had never fucked anything up the way she did all the time. She watched them die and she couldn't save them. Neither could Addison. Neither could anyone. That's how the universe works.
So what's three more lives destroyed in a single night?
Meredith's still not sure who she's going to be when she grows up. She's not even sure who she is tonight. She knows she's not a princess or a police officer, but hey, maybe she is. Maybe she's everything all at once.
She kisses Addison, then Derek, then Addison again, and her lips curl into a telltale Meredith smile.
She wonders who she'll want tomorrow. She wonders who she'll be.
Author: Amy/fox1013 (alexia@innergeekdom.net) and Kat/ lone_lilly (ktblle@gmail.com)
Fandom: Grey's Anatomy. Duh.
Spoilers: We grab details stuff from the finale, but it's not necessarily spoilery for it.
Summary: This could get messy, but you don't seem to mind. (Meredith/Addison, Meredith/Addison/Derek)
Rating: NC17, man
Notes: Cross-posted all over. Title, summary, and cut tag from various Alanis Morissette songs. Because if anyone loved Alanis? It was teenaged Meredith Grey. Seriously.
4,000 words exactly
Meredith wears costumes like other people wear their own skin. It isn't her fault, really. She never woke up and said "I think today I'm going to play a role" and started acting. It's just one of those things that happens to her. The alternative to disappearance, Meredith thinks, is reinvention, and out of two crappy choices, it's got to be the preferable one. So one day she has pink hair. So one day she decides to be a doctor. So one day she lets two of her coworkers live with her. So one day she sleeps with her boss.
So one day she sleeps with his wife.
That's pretty much how Meredith rolls, these days. You take a catalyst, and then you offer her a list of options. And she'll always, always, always choose the worst one. It's never about ethics, or morals, or logic. It's always about getting what she wants, when she wants it. And it always, always backfires horribly.
The thing is, it's not planned, or malicious, or anything like that. Meredith can't blame any one or any thing, not Addison or the drinks at Joe's or the things Derek said at work that morning. They're all factors, but no one's at fault, not really. It's just what the day decided for her. Some people wake up to see what the weather's going to be like. Meredith wakes up to discover who she's going to be that morning.
She thought it might be a disease, once. Or a disorder. One of those mental psychoses that happen to pretty girls who don't know how good they have it. Except it's not MPD and it's not schizophrenia. It's just being a fourteen-year-old girl, really. Except that it started when Meredith was about six, and it doesn't show any signs of stopping.
Cristina said once that she's never had a problem answering the question of what she wants to be when she grows up, because she's always known: surgeon. She's going to be a surgeon. She is a surgeon. Cristina was probably saying that in diapers. Out loud, while everyone else was gurgling in baby talk. She was probably spelling it, too.
Meredith? Meredith didn't even know about growing up. Not just when she was little; they'd ask her if she wanted the red or the blue crayon, and she'd grab both because she was never sure if today was a day for flames or for sky. And not as she got older, either. They'd ask her what classes she wanted to take in high school and she'd shrug, and they'd put her in the hard classes so she took them and did well because, well, what else was she going to do? They'd ask her what college she wanted to go to and she'd shrug, so her guidance counselor said apply to Dartmouth early and she did and she went and she did fine. No one asked her what she wanted to do after college; she was, after all, Ellis Grey's daughter. So she went to med school. And then she got an internship. Exactly the way it was supposed to work, except maybe somewhere in there something went wrong, because this was what was supposed to make her happy, and she's pretty sure happy doesn't feel like this.
Some days, Meredith wants to blow off the hospital and go to work at a rodeo or a police station or a magical castle. But it doesn't work like that when you're not six anymore.
And the thing about Meredith is that she never knows she doesn't want to do something anymore until she's in the middle of it and getting out is nearly impossible.
Derek. George. Denny's LVAD wire.
But because she's Ellis Grey's daughter, everyone expects her to have the right answers. Which is sort of funny, she thinks, but not ha-ha funny, but rather drink-yourself-silly-with-tequila funny. Because Meredith? Meredith Grey? Never has the right answers. Meredith has the complete opposite of right answers.
Which brings her back to the Addison thing.
She'll blame it on the alcohol and the three small children they couldn't save in the O.R. but what it really boils down to is that Meredith wanted to know what it was like to be Addison for just a moment, and this is the moment she wants to have.
Addison is the woman Derek chose. She has great hair and a great rack and Meredith's pretty sure she's never walked around with a Hello Kitty band-aid on her face. Addison talks in the operating room and people listen. She's one of the best doctors at Seattle Grace. Hell, Addison's even the sort of daughter Ellis Grey could be proud of. In short, she's pretty much everything Meredith Grey wakes up pretending to be.
There isn't a single detail about Addison that Meredith isn't filing away somewhere. Not the hair color- that's too obvious- or even the perfume, but there are little things Meredith can do, tiny pieces she can take in for herself that maybe no one will notice have nothing to do with the Meredith they knew yesterday. But then, of course they won't. People around her always seem to think that she's one person, not a bunch of personalities flowing between each other to form this whole that's not really whole, because secretly? Meredith's kind of empty.
So maybe doing this, fucking Addison (and liking it), is just a way to fill a hole in her life, for a little while. For a day, or an hour, or a second. Maybe it's just part of Meredith's never-ending quest to find some way to make herself into one cohesive person.
Except usually, those things aren't nearly this fun.
Dying her hair burned her scalp, and being a doctor was a lot of work, and sleeping with Derek had more ramifications than a one-night stand is supposed to. But sex with Addison? Exactly what it's supposed to be.
See, here's the thing about Meredith's life: every day is another choice, another chance to get it wrong. And every day she finds a way to do that, a new and more explosive way that will bring everyone down around her.
And maybe tomorrow, something, anything- Derek's reaction, Izzie's reaction, George's reaction, hell, Addison's reaction- will make today seem like a much bigger mistake than it feels like at the moment. But right now? She doesn't have that stupid sinking feeling in her stomach that happens whenever she realizes just how badly she screwed up.
And it's kind of a nice thing to not have, for once.
So, she does things to Addison that she knows will feel good because she learned them from Derek, who must have learned them from his wife. And his wife does things back to her that definitely feel good because she's been with Derek since he's been with Meredith, and then they do things to each other that feel fantastic and both forget Derek completely.
(One thing that will always be true about Meredith: she doesn't do anything half way.)
Until Meredith licks a path up Addison's still-trembling thigh and Addison pulls her up for a kiss and then the entire experience is over and Derek is very much a part of everything again.
And not just in the metaphorical elephant-in-the-corner sense, but the very real leaning against the door frame sense.
It's a true testament to the lengths Meredith's willing to go to find herself, when she manages not to even look surprised that he's caught them.
Addison doesn't fare quite as well- Meredith suddenly realizes that Addison was looking for forgiveness in her, and that backfired pretty spectacularly, there, didn't it?- and then there's Derek. Derek, who refuses to look at either of them, choosing instead to stare at the sheets underneath them and grit his teeth determinedly. Derek, who ruined ferry boats for Meredith and now can't stop seeing red.
Literally. The sheets. They're red. And Italian.
At least they're not the flannel sheets, Meredith thinks, but even she knows better than to point that out.
She's self-destructive to a decidedly pathological degree, but she isn't stupid.
The Meredith of any other day might react. Might get up, might run away, might burst into tears (that's a big one for her these days), but today's Meredith is into this and ready for more, and if letting her hormones get in front of her common sense is a crime, well, hasn't Meredith been punished enough?
Which is why she's looking at Derek like he's not just That Dick She Once Slept With, and then her gaze slides to Addison like she's not The Slutty Cheating Wife Of Her Ex, and she realizes that the ball is wholly and completely in their court. Addison would fuck her. Derek would fuck her. The question is if they're willing to share her with each other.
Derek doesn't stop glaring, but he does walk farther into the room. Addison's face is still frozen in something closely resembling shock, but she lets go of the sheet she was holding in front of herself and lets it drop to the mattress, revealing skin. And if Meredith's right there next to it, even if Derek's eyes never leave them, well, it wouldn't be right, letting that much naked be there without acknowledging it with a stroke of a finger. Or, say, maybe a tongue.
This is not the thing that yesterday's Meredith would do. It's not the thing that pick me, choose me, love me Meredith would do. It's not the kind of thing that don't-call-me-a-whore Meredith would do either, because this Meredith, the one she is right now? She is kind of a whore, but more than that, she's kind of happy with it. She still wouldn't let anyone call her one, of course- and if Derek opens his mouth and says one word to ruin it, she's going to make sure he's at Seattle Grace as a patient instead of a doctor, because she's pretty sure he could take him and then leave him sitting there injured and bleeding until she gets off - but for now, she's nothing but dirty thoughts and nerve endings and, fuck, hormones. Hormones are awesome.
Meredith's fucked a married man before- that was prom, in a nutshell- but she's never screwed a couple at the same time.
She kisses Addison. When she feels Addison's hand knotting itself in her hair, she knows she's won.
And that's the thing that really gets her hot. They thought they could put her behind them, thought they could forget her and she'd just go away. But she's fucking tired of being the Meredith that puts on a different costume everyday and hopes that it's the one that makes her unforgettable.
These two? These two are NOT going to forget her. And just to make sure they both know this, she pushes Addison back onto the bed and straddles her, drinking from her mouth until she feels Derek brush her shoulder. She takes her time ending the kiss, and when she glances at the man standing beside the bed, she does her best imitation of Their Look and isn't surprised at all to see the effect it has on him.
But this isn't about him, it's all about her, the Meredith of Today, and so after a moment, she returns her attention back to Addison.
If she wants to be Addison then she has to think like Addison and so she asks herself: What Would Addison Do? Well, for starters, she's pretty sure that Addison, beloved by all, would take advantage of the exquisitely naked pair of breasts in front of her, and so that's exactly what she does next.
Someone makes a sound of approval when she touches the tip of her tongue to Addison's nipple, and she's so far into this game she can't even tell who it was.
She swirls her tongue and sucks and then moves to the other, back and forth until Addison's panting underneath her, and Derek's taking very measured deep breaths beside them, and then she does exactly what she imagines Addison would do if Addison were in charge.
She stops. Because Addison isn't the one in charge, Meredith is, and she's sort of got a theme going now so if she's going to be running this little party the two of them need to be paying more attention to her.
So, in one fluid motion that impresses even her, she shifts so she and Addison are on their sides and she extends a hand out in invitation to Derek.
He has to participate. They both do.
Meredith's newest role is playing herself, and maybe it's the hardest role that she's ever had, because there's no rule book for her to follow except her own gut, and her gut has notoriously bad taste. But she's not doing a bad job, maybe, because Derek takes her hand and Meredith does this thing she didn't even know she could do that gets his jacket off and she's about to tear off his shirt when he does it himself instead.
Which is kind of a mood killer, but also kind of hot. It's a nice shirt. She wouldn't want it destroyed either.
Still, Meredith is a fan of naked, really, so everyone getting naked is a big plus in her world. Especially when everyone, in this case, looks like Addison and McDreamy. Which she shouldn't be thinking of him as, when she can see him, naked, he should be Derek here, but it's kind of a hard habit to break. Especially when she can't believe this is happening in real life, to her. This is the kind of thing that would happen to one of the bleached-blonde girls on Naughty Nurses 16, not to a wannabe doctor whose biggest claim to fame will always be "Do you know who her mother is?" So it's understandable, Meredith thinks, that she keeps sliding into fantasy territory, over and over again.
There are differences, of course. Little things that remind her that it's real life. Like the way that Addison's skin is so flushed that she looks sick instead of just hot, or the way that Derek's eyes look so dark they're practically twin black holes, like he's hiding something important or knows something no one else does or whatever. Or the way that she, Meredith, has hair so sweaty that it's sticking to her back. In a fantasy or a porn movie, Meredith thinks, her hair would look awesome.
But this isn't a fantasy or a porn movie, and Meredith is not a character. She is not wearing a costume. She's just Meredith, and this is just real life, and her only options right now are to give up or get off.
She doesn't think the Meredith she is today is a fan of giving up. So that means door number two for the win.
Stretching up a little, she leans closer to Derek- McDreamy? Dr. Shepherd? It was all so much easier when she didn't know his name- and smiles at him. And it's not a Meredith smile he'll recognize but it's one that seems to do the trick because he kind of groans a little and suddenly he's holding her face the way he does and his mouth is on hers.
This might possibly be the moment where any of the other Merediths might start to get cold feet. The moment she knows she doesn't want to, and her stomach starts sinking and her skin starts throbbing. Except before she can get all the way there, before she has more than a brief shock of reality, Derek's pushing her back on the bed and Addison's hands are slipping down her belly and she's sliding right back to where she wants to be.
Four hands? Four hands are way better than two, she decides, and she squirms underneath all those perfectly skilled and expensive fingers.
She pretends not to notice when Derek pushes Addison's hand away. Meredith instead turns her head to his wife, who watches all of it like it's the best performance she's seen in years (and, really, isn't it?), and it might be Derek's hand inside her but it's Addison who bites into her bottom lip so exquisitely that everything suddenly explodes inside of her.
She doesn't call out either of their names when she comes.
The weird part is how they keep touching her and kissing her, because they both know the hows and whys of her now, but neither of them seem to know what to do next and it kind of, sort of, just a little pisses her off.
The two of them are so fucking passive aggressive with everything that even though she knows that this whole night will ruin everything for all of them, she wants to fuck things up just a tiny bit more.
She wonders what would happen now, if she changed everything in the world. If she stood up, got dressed, and never looked back. Walked right from their trailer to a train, and became a rodeo clown overnight. Would that change anything? Would it make anything better? Ellis Grey's daughter, accepted to one of the top med programs on the West Coast... rodeo clown. It's almost enough to make her leave, just for the irony of it all.
But the bed's too comfortable to get up from. So she chooses the only other path she can think of.
"So are you two getting a divorce now, or what?" she asks, and Addison and Derek both turn from fire to ice, one person completely still on each side of her, and she takes the opportunity to snuggle deeper into the bed. The sheets are soft, and warm with three people's body heat by now. The dark red of the fabric stains everything she sees when she closes her eyes. She wonders if these were his favorites, after the flannel. She wonders how many of his favorite things she'll be able to destroy.
When Meredith was a freshman at Dartmouth, she was full of moments like this, lying in a bed and asking questions and trying to change the universe with these thoughts that seemed so fucking deep at the time. Okay, they were never moments exactly like this, because usually it was her and her roommate (pre-getting kicked out) and maybe a few friends, with a bottle of vodka being passed among all of them, and everyone was clothed and no one was having sex, but still. It was close. And the questions they'd asked- they were always, always questions about life and death and sin and redemption and heaven and hell and who deserved what and how they wished it would happen. Questions that, theoretically, seemed really important and deep, but practically, made her seem kind of like a sociopath.
She kind of feels like that sociopath right now. Addison and Derek are both freezing up and she doesn't care, because in her own way, she's trying to give them what they gave her. She's trying to give them a way to ask a question they didn't even know they'd been dying to ask.
Meredith doesn't know who she is, not really, but at least she knows she doesn't know. Addison doesn't know what she wants, and Derek doesn't know what he has, and that makes both of them, in a lot of ways, even dumber than Meredith. She might be the intern screwing the attendings, but they're the attendings screwing the intern and each other.
In those terms, actually, she thinks she may be the smartest one in the room.
Everything about Meredith is buzzing, and her stomach's sinking in that telltale way that she's been fighting ever since she found Addison and went home with her. It's one of those cues her body gives her when she's gone too far, but those are cues everyday Meredith takes, and today Meredith is ignoring them. And maybe tomorrow she'll wake up and realize that it wasn't sleeping with Addison that was the biggest mistake of her life, or even sleeping with Addison and Derek at once- it was stopping everything they had to bring reality into the picture.
But if there's one thing that today's Meredith specializes in, it's reality. Not a costume, not an act. And if she's forcing herself to be real, everyone else has to play the same game. They're not royalty kept in magical towers or heroes sent to save the day. They're not just a ferry boat ride from salvation. Everything has to be real, not whatever act they've chosen for the day.
"I want to fuck you both," she says. Her voice doesn't sound like her own. She sounds like one of them, she thinks, speaking in the operating room. But she keeps talking. "I want to fuck you, but not if tomorrow I'm just going to be another Mark."
She lets her words sink in and then turns to Addison first, who simply glances away and nods. Addison, she's figured out, will do anything for atonement, even fuck her husband's dirty mistress, even fuck them both. Meredith thinks that maybe being Addison isn't such a great idea after all.
So, she tilts her head and looks at Derek. Derek, who still has a possessive hand across her hip and who hasn't stopped looking at her since he entered the room, and who happens to be harder than she ever remembers him being.
It's a challenge. She's there, she's willing, she'll go through with it, but she'll be damned if he's going to forget her when it's over.
It feels to her like the moment stretches on forever, but she's always been prone to exaggerate things and, really, she's not in any hurry.
(But then she's come three times- twice with his wife, and once with the both of them- and she can afford to have a little patience. He's the one who can't.)
He takes in a breath, does not look at his wife, and says simply, "Yes."
Of course he does. She knew he would.
Which is funny- really funny, the kind of funny she could use in a story later if there were anyone in the world she could tell about this night, which there isn't, because even Cristina would laugh at her (not in the snarky but nice way she's used to, Meredith thinks, but in the "you're so fucked up you frighten even me" way that's kind of like hysteria), so it'll just be Meredith's punch line for herself- because that, right there? That's proof that she was right, and she was wrong, all at once. Because he shouldn't have agreed to this, any more than Addison should have, any more than she should have suggested it in the first place. Because that's not him being loyal to himself, that's him being loyal to this ideal of himself that he's never been but convinced himself he'll always be, and that's Addison, trying to be the wife that Derek wants, and that's her, Meredith, trying to fill a hole and trying to be herself and trying to become everyone else in the process.
Meredith watched three people die today in the hospital. Tiny kids who had never fucked anything up the way she did all the time. She watched them die and she couldn't save them. Neither could Addison. Neither could anyone. That's how the universe works.
So what's three more lives destroyed in a single night?
Meredith's still not sure who she's going to be when she grows up. She's not even sure who she is tonight. She knows she's not a princess or a police officer, but hey, maybe she is. Maybe she's everything all at once.
She kisses Addison, then Derek, then Addison again, and her lips curl into a telltale Meredith smile.
She wonders who she'll want tomorrow. She wonders who she'll be.