(no subject)
01 - No Obstacles, Only Challenges
02 - Girls Like Us
03 - Champagne Beat Boogie
04 - You're the Lucky Ones
05 - Duke's Up
06 - 20 Minutes of Disco Glory
07 - Perpetual
Title: Groove ♠ Halcyon [8/14]
Rating: PG
Pairing: Addison/Mark/Derek.
Summary: Boy #1 and Boy #2 show up for a very long surgery indeed and Addison makes them play Rock Paper Scissors because she’s sure as hell not picking who gets the medical chart equivalent of shotgun, both boys get a look at Juliet two years later and Addison gives them a piece of her mind (and it certainly has no cherries on top), there’s another snowstorm but in a good fun snow angel kind of way, and there is one remarkably awful cop-out transition that the author sincerely hopes you will forgive her.
Note: Now? Now you can start guessing. I won't keep you waiting a whole lot longer, but about now is when you can go Nancy Drew on this if you're super eager to know who donated the other half of Juliet's DNA. Also, I am backlogged on replying comments. I lose and give a blanket apology.
Addison put on her most genuine fake smile as she walked toward her office, knowing that Mark and Derek were both in there waiting for her. It had been a morning: spilled orange juice, an improvised breakfast because Addison put the Cheerios box back mostly empty, traffic and unfortunate humidity. Her day was only three hours old and she had no patience for what she knew the two men were going to attack her with later on. But for the moment, she smiled as genuinely as she could and opened her office door.
“Thanks for coming in, guys.” Addison offered her patient’s chart and sighed when both of them reached for it at once and then gestured in a patronizing way that the other should go first and there was certainly no way she was picking one. It would come across as picking favorites and begin the competition for her attention and the prize of finding out which of them was Juliet’s father. “Grow up or play rock, paper, scissors. Paper beats rock because that’s just the way it is.” Addison watched and handed Mark the chart. “Share.”
She waited until each of them had his chance with the chart and she leaned back on her desk, hands braced on the edge. “I know you guys usually do this in parts. Derek, you do your thing, we wake up the patient and see what’s going on and then Mark, you do your thing. But Baby’s been a little unsteady and I think it would be better to do it all at once and limit fetal stress.”
Mark and Derek nodded. Medicine, they could agree on. Addison led them out of her office to their patient’s room.
--
“Oh, shut up!” Addison shouted in the scrub room at Derek and Mark at five o’clock in the morning the day of an exhausting sixteen to eighteen hours of surgery. “Do not loiter,” she looked at the interns watching with wide eyes, having never seen Addison shout before. “Go in, now,” she ordered and they all rushed out, knowing when they were being handed an opportunity to save their asses. “Patient,” she pointed through the window, “doctors,” she pointed at herself and then the two of them. “Let’s save that mother and her child and then try to kill each other.” She turned to Derek out of habit and he tied up her scrub mask and she knew that he was secretly smiling behind his. She could tell by the way that he took longer than he used to that it was a smug smile, a point for him against Mark.
Three years later and they were still fighting for her.
She took some pride in their fight, some boost to her ego in the knowledge that she could still make a man who didn’t love her and a man who shouldn’t love her fight each other for her, some comfort that she was worth fighting for.
--
Surgery went well but Derek and Mark planned to stick around for another day just to make sure things stayed going well. Addison The Mom was not thrilled, but Addison The Doctor agreed.
--
“I should’ve had Ellie look after you today,” Addison whispered, her words muffled in Juliet’s reddish-brown hair as she walked out of the elevator the next night. “Would’ve made this part easier.”
Mark and Derek were waiting for them like circling hawks, each wanting to get in first, each wanting to see who might be his daughter before the other. Addison had left Juliet with a nanny for the past two days but Fridays were the nanny’s official day off and Addison had a guilt complex no therapist had ever been able to crack. She closed her eyes in a slow blink and rolled her eyes so they couldn’t see it. She took a deep breath, steadied her hold on a sleeping Juliet and walked toward them.
They both began to talk at once, though neither of them actually said anything she cared to listen to and all she could hear was their voices getting louder and louder as they tried to talk over each other and they were quickly reaching the point where they were about to wake up her daughter. And Juliet was cranky when she was woken up from a nap before she decided it was over. The rush of energy Addison felt at them fighting over her yesterday turned into frustration and she waited a minute, long enough to let them get things out of their system, and then spoke.
“Quiet,” she said softly and silenced them with one word and a stern look. “You two don’t get to fight over her. She’s mine. She is my daughter. No amount of yelling at each other or me is going to change who her father is. I am not telling. Not after this impressive display of testosterone. I am not having this,” she gestured with a free hand, “in her life.”
The two men recognized the look in Addison’s eyes as that of a mother bear they once encountered while camping when they made the mistake of stepping between her and her cub. Blinking, they realized that this was no longer about Addison (and, except for the first few days, had never really ever been about Addison at all), but about her daughter.
As if on cue, Juliet woke up and stretched a little. She turned her head and sleepily blinked her big brown eyes at the two strange men. Wiggling her way out of Addison’s arms and down to the floor, she kept firm hold on her mother’s hand and stepped in front of her in an odd role reversal of protection. She had no idea what was going on - she was comfortably asleep in her mother’s arms and then suddenly faced with two men she had never seen before who didn’t seem too happy - but could tell that Addison was tense and uncomfortable. Juliet squeezed Addison’s hand gently and looked up at her, confused.
Addison plastered on a smile. “Juliet, this is Derek and Mark,” she pointed in turn. “Derek, Mark, this is Juliet.”
Derek immediately crouched down to Juliet’s eye level. “Hi,” he said softly, a complete one-eighty from his voice a few minutes earlier. He looked for visual signs that she was his and settled on her chocolatey eyes.
“Hi!” She returned happily, biting her lip in a bad habit inherited from her mother.
Mark did the same and decided she had his angular bone structure and tapped her nose lightly, earning himself a giggle. Juliet yawned after she said hi to Mark and looked up at Addison. Mark stood up as Addison lifted her daughter back into her arms to fall asleep again on her shoulder.
“I’m still not telling.” She lost her smile and dropped her voice in anger. “She is not a commodity to fight over, she isn’t something to own, something to brag about that you have that he doesn’t. She is my daughter and if either of you wants to be part of her life, grow up and treat her that way.” She shot each of them a dirty look. Though they were both cute with Juliet, she could sense the underlying competition between the two. Then she smiled again and brought her voice back up to normal. “Have a good night. I’ll see you two in the morning.”
Addison was beyond thankful that their patient and her child continued to get better, the mother had woken up and would make a full recovery, the baby was no longer in any distress and even more thankful that Derek and Mark left the next day.
It is now two years later. Juliet is four. Addison has had no direct contact with who her sister has dubbed Stupid Is and Stupid Does (but neither can ever keep it straight).
It is January and seven hours earlier one half of a set of premature twins died of sudden complications and two hours later his otherwise healthy brother followed.
Juliet looked over at her mother from her spot on the floor, coloring on the coffee table after dinner. Addison had been uncharacteristically silent since she picked her up from preschool and was curled up in one of their big chairs, staring aimlessly at a medical journal in front of her. She hadn’t turned a page in ten minutes. Juliet frowned, concerned.
“Mommy?” She put down her crayon, not liking her picture anyway, and turned on the pillow she was sitting on to fully face her mother. At receiving no answer, she tried again. “Mommy?”
Addison shook her head out of the clouds. “What? Oh, sorry.” You are four years old, you are not supposed to have that knowing look about you yet, she thought. “What’s up?”
Instead of answering, since she wasn’t the one who had the problem, Juliet stood up and climbed into her mother’s lap. She plucked the journal out of Addison’s hands and cutely took off her glasses and set both aside and then circled her arms around Addison’s neck and hugged her after giving her a quick kiss on the cheek.
Addison held still for a moment and then relaxed, bringing her arms up to hold Juliet tightly to her. Losing babies always hurt, but Addison discovered that it hurt so much more now that she had her own child. She thought it would go away with time, that the serious hurt would diminish as Juliet got older and grew further away from the age of Addison’s tiny patients, but it didn’t. It only got worse. Addison bit her lip against tears as Juliet tightened her arms.
“It’s okay, Mommy. I’ve got you,” Juliet whispered, mimicking the calming words Addison used on her when she had a bad dream.
Addison buried her head in Juliet’s shoulder and the tears became too much to push back and she began to cry. She held tightly onto her daughter, hung on for dear life, and simply cried. Juliet rubbed small, calming circles on Addison’s back as best she could from her angle and gently leaned her head on her mother’s shoulder and did everything Addison had ever done to comfort her to comfort Addison.
Addison wished for things to be different. She wished that her specialty wasn’t so tragic. She wished that she felt like she could call someone and say “Hey, you’re Juliet’s father” and not feel like things would become complicated. She wished that she didn’t know Mark still loved her. She wished she knew what to do with that information. She wished she hadn’t heard about Derek proposing to Meredith. Hell, she wished that the paperboy found the sidewalk more frequently. But most of all, she wished her patients had survived at least long enough to learn how to smile and she wished that she could tell Juliet’s father that he was a father. She knew that there was the potential for things to be okay and work out and not be strange and complicated and frustrating, but if that week two years earlier was any indication, that potential was small. And she refused to put Juliet in a situation that had little positive potential. So she just wished and cried on the shoulder of her daughter, feeling comforted in a way she hadn’t in years.
She pulled back after a while and sniffled, laughing when Juliet tugged a tissue out of the box and handed it to her. She blew her nose and then kissed her daughter’s forehead. “Thank you, Julie.”
Juliet smiled and wiped a few tears off of Addison’s cheek for her. “What’s wrong?” Even though there was little chance that she would understand the details, Juliet meant the question seriously.
Addison took a short breath in and looked away, tears threatening to come back. “Bad day.” She looked back at Juliet who looked disappointed in the answer, as if she knew that Addison was leaving out bits. “And I’ll explain the rest of it to you when you understand what ‘adultery’ means.” She reminded herself to move the dictionary to a shelf Juliet couldn’t reach.
Moderately satisfied, knowing that that was all she would get, Juliet nodded. “I love you,” she offered with her cute four year-old girlish smile.
Addison smiled and lightly kissed her kid’s nose. “I love you too.” She hugged Juliet again, out of motherly love this time. “Come on, let’s get you to bed.” Addison stood up after helping Juliet back to the floor. She offered her her hand.
Juliet put on a stubborn pout. She looked at the clock. “It’s early.” Five minutes early, to be exact, but she wasn’t about to point that out. She pouted even more. “And we finished the book.”
Laughing softly, Addison patted her daughter on the back, encouraging her toward the stairs. “Mommy Magic. Come on, up.” She had spent her lunch break in the bookstore in an attempt to temporarily soothe her nerves and emotions. It mostly worked.
“If there’s a snow day tomorrow, will you stay home with me?” Juliet looked up at Addison after she had turned back from putting the new book on Juliet’s bedside table. The girl loved school, but loved snow even more.
Addison glanced out the window. A snow day was entirely possible; it had been coming down steadily for about five hours and didn’t look like it was going to stop. Addison mentally sorted through her schedule for the next day and, when she came up completely blank with an amazingly rare surgery-free day, she nodded. “Yes,” she grinned and kissed Juliet’s forehead. She was about to slide off her daughter’s bed when Juliet caught her in a hug again.
“Feel better,” she said with a smile that reached her deep blue eyes.
She tucked a stray chunk of hair behind Juliet’s ear - it had gradually changed from fiery red to a dark brownish blonde almost a year ago, much to Addison’s simultaneous amusement and dismay - and smiled crookedly. “Thank you. Dream of snow days, you have me wanting one too.”
--
Addison fell backwards into a deep snowdrift, grimacing as the powdery snow made its way down her jacket and, somehow, down the back of her pants. She put out her arms and legs and swept them across the snow to make a snow angel. When she was done, she lay there staring up at the sky and catching snowflakes on her tongue and every so often turned her head to make sure Juliet was still within sight.
Boots crunched across the driveway she had shoveled the previous night only to come out after breakfast and discover that three inches of snow had covered her hard work. She sat up and looked, wondering how she had missed the sound of a car or who she was supposed to be expecting. Some snow fell off of her hat and she frowned at it, wiping it out of her eyes. Addison raised an eyebrow part out of confusion, part out of shock when her eyes focused on the man standing in front of her.
“Want me to shovel this?” Mark said with a smirk. “And don’t turn around. Your kid’s about to pelt you with a snowball.”
♠ Anomaly Calling Your Name
02 - Girls Like Us
03 - Champagne Beat Boogie
04 - You're the Lucky Ones
05 - Duke's Up
06 - 20 Minutes of Disco Glory
07 - Perpetual
Title: Groove ♠ Halcyon [8/14]
Rating: PG
Pairing: Addison/Mark/Derek.
Summary: Boy #1 and Boy #2 show up for a very long surgery indeed and Addison makes them play Rock Paper Scissors because she’s sure as hell not picking who gets the medical chart equivalent of shotgun, both boys get a look at Juliet two years later and Addison gives them a piece of her mind (and it certainly has no cherries on top), there’s another snowstorm but in a good fun snow angel kind of way, and there is one remarkably awful cop-out transition that the author sincerely hopes you will forgive her.
Note: Now? Now you can start guessing. I won't keep you waiting a whole lot longer, but about now is when you can go Nancy Drew on this if you're super eager to know who donated the other half of Juliet's DNA. Also, I am backlogged on replying comments. I lose and give a blanket apology.
Addison put on her most genuine fake smile as she walked toward her office, knowing that Mark and Derek were both in there waiting for her. It had been a morning: spilled orange juice, an improvised breakfast because Addison put the Cheerios box back mostly empty, traffic and unfortunate humidity. Her day was only three hours old and she had no patience for what she knew the two men were going to attack her with later on. But for the moment, she smiled as genuinely as she could and opened her office door.
“Thanks for coming in, guys.” Addison offered her patient’s chart and sighed when both of them reached for it at once and then gestured in a patronizing way that the other should go first and there was certainly no way she was picking one. It would come across as picking favorites and begin the competition for her attention and the prize of finding out which of them was Juliet’s father. “Grow up or play rock, paper, scissors. Paper beats rock because that’s just the way it is.” Addison watched and handed Mark the chart. “Share.”
She waited until each of them had his chance with the chart and she leaned back on her desk, hands braced on the edge. “I know you guys usually do this in parts. Derek, you do your thing, we wake up the patient and see what’s going on and then Mark, you do your thing. But Baby’s been a little unsteady and I think it would be better to do it all at once and limit fetal stress.”
Mark and Derek nodded. Medicine, they could agree on. Addison led them out of her office to their patient’s room.
--
“Oh, shut up!” Addison shouted in the scrub room at Derek and Mark at five o’clock in the morning the day of an exhausting sixteen to eighteen hours of surgery. “Do not loiter,” she looked at the interns watching with wide eyes, having never seen Addison shout before. “Go in, now,” she ordered and they all rushed out, knowing when they were being handed an opportunity to save their asses. “Patient,” she pointed through the window, “doctors,” she pointed at herself and then the two of them. “Let’s save that mother and her child and then try to kill each other.” She turned to Derek out of habit and he tied up her scrub mask and she knew that he was secretly smiling behind his. She could tell by the way that he took longer than he used to that it was a smug smile, a point for him against Mark.
Three years later and they were still fighting for her.
She took some pride in their fight, some boost to her ego in the knowledge that she could still make a man who didn’t love her and a man who shouldn’t love her fight each other for her, some comfort that she was worth fighting for.
--
Surgery went well but Derek and Mark planned to stick around for another day just to make sure things stayed going well. Addison The Mom was not thrilled, but Addison The Doctor agreed.
--
“I should’ve had Ellie look after you today,” Addison whispered, her words muffled in Juliet’s reddish-brown hair as she walked out of the elevator the next night. “Would’ve made this part easier.”
Mark and Derek were waiting for them like circling hawks, each wanting to get in first, each wanting to see who might be his daughter before the other. Addison had left Juliet with a nanny for the past two days but Fridays were the nanny’s official day off and Addison had a guilt complex no therapist had ever been able to crack. She closed her eyes in a slow blink and rolled her eyes so they couldn’t see it. She took a deep breath, steadied her hold on a sleeping Juliet and walked toward them.
They both began to talk at once, though neither of them actually said anything she cared to listen to and all she could hear was their voices getting louder and louder as they tried to talk over each other and they were quickly reaching the point where they were about to wake up her daughter. And Juliet was cranky when she was woken up from a nap before she decided it was over. The rush of energy Addison felt at them fighting over her yesterday turned into frustration and she waited a minute, long enough to let them get things out of their system, and then spoke.
“Quiet,” she said softly and silenced them with one word and a stern look. “You two don’t get to fight over her. She’s mine. She is my daughter. No amount of yelling at each other or me is going to change who her father is. I am not telling. Not after this impressive display of testosterone. I am not having this,” she gestured with a free hand, “in her life.”
The two men recognized the look in Addison’s eyes as that of a mother bear they once encountered while camping when they made the mistake of stepping between her and her cub. Blinking, they realized that this was no longer about Addison (and, except for the first few days, had never really ever been about Addison at all), but about her daughter.
As if on cue, Juliet woke up and stretched a little. She turned her head and sleepily blinked her big brown eyes at the two strange men. Wiggling her way out of Addison’s arms and down to the floor, she kept firm hold on her mother’s hand and stepped in front of her in an odd role reversal of protection. She had no idea what was going on - she was comfortably asleep in her mother’s arms and then suddenly faced with two men she had never seen before who didn’t seem too happy - but could tell that Addison was tense and uncomfortable. Juliet squeezed Addison’s hand gently and looked up at her, confused.
Addison plastered on a smile. “Juliet, this is Derek and Mark,” she pointed in turn. “Derek, Mark, this is Juliet.”
Derek immediately crouched down to Juliet’s eye level. “Hi,” he said softly, a complete one-eighty from his voice a few minutes earlier. He looked for visual signs that she was his and settled on her chocolatey eyes.
“Hi!” She returned happily, biting her lip in a bad habit inherited from her mother.
Mark did the same and decided she had his angular bone structure and tapped her nose lightly, earning himself a giggle. Juliet yawned after she said hi to Mark and looked up at Addison. Mark stood up as Addison lifted her daughter back into her arms to fall asleep again on her shoulder.
“I’m still not telling.” She lost her smile and dropped her voice in anger. “She is not a commodity to fight over, she isn’t something to own, something to brag about that you have that he doesn’t. She is my daughter and if either of you wants to be part of her life, grow up and treat her that way.” She shot each of them a dirty look. Though they were both cute with Juliet, she could sense the underlying competition between the two. Then she smiled again and brought her voice back up to normal. “Have a good night. I’ll see you two in the morning.”
Addison was beyond thankful that their patient and her child continued to get better, the mother had woken up and would make a full recovery, the baby was no longer in any distress and even more thankful that Derek and Mark left the next day.
It is now two years later. Juliet is four. Addison has had no direct contact with who her sister has dubbed Stupid Is and Stupid Does (but neither can ever keep it straight).
It is January and seven hours earlier one half of a set of premature twins died of sudden complications and two hours later his otherwise healthy brother followed.
Juliet looked over at her mother from her spot on the floor, coloring on the coffee table after dinner. Addison had been uncharacteristically silent since she picked her up from preschool and was curled up in one of their big chairs, staring aimlessly at a medical journal in front of her. She hadn’t turned a page in ten minutes. Juliet frowned, concerned.
“Mommy?” She put down her crayon, not liking her picture anyway, and turned on the pillow she was sitting on to fully face her mother. At receiving no answer, she tried again. “Mommy?”
Addison shook her head out of the clouds. “What? Oh, sorry.” You are four years old, you are not supposed to have that knowing look about you yet, she thought. “What’s up?”
Instead of answering, since she wasn’t the one who had the problem, Juliet stood up and climbed into her mother’s lap. She plucked the journal out of Addison’s hands and cutely took off her glasses and set both aside and then circled her arms around Addison’s neck and hugged her after giving her a quick kiss on the cheek.
Addison held still for a moment and then relaxed, bringing her arms up to hold Juliet tightly to her. Losing babies always hurt, but Addison discovered that it hurt so much more now that she had her own child. She thought it would go away with time, that the serious hurt would diminish as Juliet got older and grew further away from the age of Addison’s tiny patients, but it didn’t. It only got worse. Addison bit her lip against tears as Juliet tightened her arms.
“It’s okay, Mommy. I’ve got you,” Juliet whispered, mimicking the calming words Addison used on her when she had a bad dream.
Addison buried her head in Juliet’s shoulder and the tears became too much to push back and she began to cry. She held tightly onto her daughter, hung on for dear life, and simply cried. Juliet rubbed small, calming circles on Addison’s back as best she could from her angle and gently leaned her head on her mother’s shoulder and did everything Addison had ever done to comfort her to comfort Addison.
Addison wished for things to be different. She wished that her specialty wasn’t so tragic. She wished that she felt like she could call someone and say “Hey, you’re Juliet’s father” and not feel like things would become complicated. She wished that she didn’t know Mark still loved her. She wished she knew what to do with that information. She wished she hadn’t heard about Derek proposing to Meredith. Hell, she wished that the paperboy found the sidewalk more frequently. But most of all, she wished her patients had survived at least long enough to learn how to smile and she wished that she could tell Juliet’s father that he was a father. She knew that there was the potential for things to be okay and work out and not be strange and complicated and frustrating, but if that week two years earlier was any indication, that potential was small. And she refused to put Juliet in a situation that had little positive potential. So she just wished and cried on the shoulder of her daughter, feeling comforted in a way she hadn’t in years.
She pulled back after a while and sniffled, laughing when Juliet tugged a tissue out of the box and handed it to her. She blew her nose and then kissed her daughter’s forehead. “Thank you, Julie.”
Juliet smiled and wiped a few tears off of Addison’s cheek for her. “What’s wrong?” Even though there was little chance that she would understand the details, Juliet meant the question seriously.
Addison took a short breath in and looked away, tears threatening to come back. “Bad day.” She looked back at Juliet who looked disappointed in the answer, as if she knew that Addison was leaving out bits. “And I’ll explain the rest of it to you when you understand what ‘adultery’ means.” She reminded herself to move the dictionary to a shelf Juliet couldn’t reach.
Moderately satisfied, knowing that that was all she would get, Juliet nodded. “I love you,” she offered with her cute four year-old girlish smile.
Addison smiled and lightly kissed her kid’s nose. “I love you too.” She hugged Juliet again, out of motherly love this time. “Come on, let’s get you to bed.” Addison stood up after helping Juliet back to the floor. She offered her her hand.
Juliet put on a stubborn pout. She looked at the clock. “It’s early.” Five minutes early, to be exact, but she wasn’t about to point that out. She pouted even more. “And we finished the book.”
Laughing softly, Addison patted her daughter on the back, encouraging her toward the stairs. “Mommy Magic. Come on, up.” She had spent her lunch break in the bookstore in an attempt to temporarily soothe her nerves and emotions. It mostly worked.
“If there’s a snow day tomorrow, will you stay home with me?” Juliet looked up at Addison after she had turned back from putting the new book on Juliet’s bedside table. The girl loved school, but loved snow even more.
Addison glanced out the window. A snow day was entirely possible; it had been coming down steadily for about five hours and didn’t look like it was going to stop. Addison mentally sorted through her schedule for the next day and, when she came up completely blank with an amazingly rare surgery-free day, she nodded. “Yes,” she grinned and kissed Juliet’s forehead. She was about to slide off her daughter’s bed when Juliet caught her in a hug again.
“Feel better,” she said with a smile that reached her deep blue eyes.
She tucked a stray chunk of hair behind Juliet’s ear - it had gradually changed from fiery red to a dark brownish blonde almost a year ago, much to Addison’s simultaneous amusement and dismay - and smiled crookedly. “Thank you. Dream of snow days, you have me wanting one too.”
--
Addison fell backwards into a deep snowdrift, grimacing as the powdery snow made its way down her jacket and, somehow, down the back of her pants. She put out her arms and legs and swept them across the snow to make a snow angel. When she was done, she lay there staring up at the sky and catching snowflakes on her tongue and every so often turned her head to make sure Juliet was still within sight.
Boots crunched across the driveway she had shoveled the previous night only to come out after breakfast and discover that three inches of snow had covered her hard work. She sat up and looked, wondering how she had missed the sound of a car or who she was supposed to be expecting. Some snow fell off of her hat and she frowned at it, wiping it out of her eyes. Addison raised an eyebrow part out of confusion, part out of shock when her eyes focused on the man standing in front of her.
“Want me to shovel this?” Mark said with a smirk. “And don’t turn around. Your kid’s about to pelt you with a snowball.”
♠ Anomaly Calling Your Name