A Posteriori
Title: A Posteriori :: Northern Lights [5/12]
Rating: NC-17
Pairing: Mark/Addison
Summary: Opening with Three of Rods (for many, many people) and that really kind of gives away the rest of it.
A Posteriori :: Eppur Si Muove
A Posteriori :: Feel Me Heaven
A Posteriori :: Dreaming of Andromeda
A Posteriori :: Dancing With Mephisto
Addison planned her life out when she was six. Most of her life, actually, the details like where she was going to live and what she was going to do were all kind of fuzzy. She wanted to marry a prince (so she could become a princess and have a sparkly tiara and ladies-in-waiting, whatever ladies-in-waiting did), move into a castle and have three beautiful children. Her only rule was that at least one of the children had to be a girl. That was the family life she wanted and, despite the elementary school dreams of being a renowned surgeon and high school hopes of becoming a wonderful individual who gives a quarter to a homeless kid for the gumball machine and medical school beliefs that she will one day have enough money to own far too many pairs of shoes for her own good, that was her dream to end all dreams. If she could have just that one, that first one - the prince and the castle and the three kids - she would be happy.
She accepted even before her first child was conceived that the three children were an impossibility and politely asked her six year-old self to scrub at the penciled words with a stubby eraser and change it to a vague number and word it so that it didn’t sound like they had to grow inside of her. Her boys are her life and even when she whispers through clenched and frustrated teeth that she’s going to kill Dylan for leaving a toy truck right in the middle of the kitchen again, there isn’t a thing she would change.
“Oh,” she whimpers as Mark pulls his fingers out of her only to quickly slip inside of her and pick up the same rhythm. She clutches at the wall behind her for support but, finding none on the slippery tile, digs her fingers into his strong back instead. “Fuck!” She screams, her head hitting the back of the shower wall as he thrusts into her over and over again, harder with each push.
“Careful,” he chuckles against her neck and circles around her clit with his fingers. “The boys might hear you.”
She gasps when he pinches her clit and bites down softly on her shoulder. “They’re in Boston,” she points out, reminding him that their kids are on vacation with her parents for a week. She’s pretty sure that her mother saw right through it and knew that Addison and Mark needed sex and sleep more than the boys needed a week of being spoiled rotten.
“My point exactly,” he ends their rapport with a smirk and a fiery kiss, pushing her over the edge with a deep thrust and he breaks the kiss just so he can hear her scream.
--
“Hey,” he says softly and takes the bottle of foundation out of her hand and sets it aside. “I like you without all,” he gestures at the mess of makeup on the counter, “this.”
“Yeah?” She sets down the makeup sponge and turns to him.
“Mmmhm.” Mark reaches out and closes her eyes and trails his fingers over the contours of her face. He takes his time, his touch light, examining her and touching everything like he would if she were a patient only softer and loving, searching for familiarity instead of imperfection. He rubs his thumb over her lips and then cups her cheeks, bringing her in for a tender kiss.
Addison’s eyes slowly flutter open. “What was that for?”
“You.”
Her eyes light up and the corners of her lips tug her mouth into a crooked smile. “You, Mark Sloan, are turning into a sap. But thank you.”
--
Addison stares at herself in the mirror once she’s finished with the toothpaste and washed and dried her face. There’s something different yet remarkably familiar about her and she blinks rapidly and shakes her head to get it to go away, blaming the light. She then rolls her eyes at herself and blames it on her eyes still adjusting to the switch from her contacts to her glasses (which reminds her to call her eye doctor and up the prescription in them) and walks out into their bedroom. She silently lifts the sheets and warm comforter and slips underneath, instinctively cuddling up to Mark even though he’s not done with his sentence yet. He raises his arm and pulls her closer to him, whispering to hang on for thirty seconds because he’s almost done.
True to his word, though technically forty-seven seconds, he puts down the book and turns off the light and scoots down to wrap his arms around her and hold her to him as they sleep. It’s hard for him now to imagine a lot of his life before her, but especially this. Especially sleeping together. They rarely cuddled during the affair because it was an affair and he knows that those were the rules but he had never truly slept with anyone, never had the intimate connection that comes from spooning around a woman as she sleeps, until they started again and made the effort. And he thinks he’s an idiot for pretending to be too masculine to want to cuddle before now.
She has a feeling as she curls around his arm looped across her waist, the same feeling she had the nights her boys were conceived. She brushes it off as a silent hope, a wish that her inner six year-old could get the third child - the daughter - she had planned for and pretended and named even if the dream had been rewritten. Mark kisses her shoulder and wishes her sweet dreams and she slowly slides away from that long ago childhood extravagant wish and drifts back into the present, a present in which her only complaint is a dripping faucet in the downstairs bathroom.
--
“Run it again.”
Michelle, Addison’s favorite NICU nurse and usual babysitter of the Montgomery-Sloan children, sighs and gives up on formalities; they’ve known each other since Addison was in her residency. “Addie. I had them run it seven times and it came back positive seven times. You’re pregnant. ”
Addison sits down in one of the comfy rocking chairs of the NICU, too in shock to be overwhelmingly happy. “I don’t understand. I was only supposed to have two. I shouldn’t get my hopes up, this is probably...hey, don’t hit me.” She glares up at Michelle who had given her a light slap on the back of her head. “I could have you fired, old woman.”
“And then who would you have to watch your kids or tell you to shut the hell up and accept that you’re pregnant and give a little thank you to whatever deity you happen to believe in?”
Addison nods and takes a deep breath. “I’m gonna wait a few days before I tell him. Just in case.”
“Girl, how dumb are you? He’s gonna know. And if that ‘just in case’ does happen, you really want to have to explain it all to him then?”
“Why are you always right?”
She smiles softly at Addison. “Because otherwise you’d be horribly misguided.”
--
“Explain this to me.”
“Addison, it’s six o’clock in the morning, I’m dripping wet and the towel’s falling off. This is not the time for you needing me to...”
“I’m pregnant.”
“What? Oh, fuck!”
Addison stifles a laugh as she hears her friend scramble around for the dropped towel. “Why do you take your cell phone into the bathroom with you anyway?”
“In case my best friend feels the need to shock me with impossible news before I’ve had coffee. Where the hell is my bathrobe? And how are you pregnant? You’re lucky you had two.”
She sighs and presses her lips together and shakes her head. “I know! That’s why I called you. You’re the one who told me I only had two. Are you sure you didn’t leave off a zero or something?”
“You doubt my reading abilities, Addison?”
“Then explain it! Don’t get me wrong, somewhere underneath the shock and confusion and fear because I’m forty-three and technically this shouldn’t be happening, I’m happy. I just...” she takes a deep breath and sits down, rubbing her temple with her fingers. “I just need to know whether I should start picking out names and wall colors or if I shouldn’t even tell Mark.” If it’s true, and that she’s about to have a healthy nine months and a healthy third child with no complications, she doesn’t want to risk jinxing it by listing off why it might not be worth saying anything.
“Have them run every single blood test, urine test possible and fax me the results and I’ll see if I can see anything. But, Addie, listen to me. You know as well as I do that sometimes the female body does really weird shit for no reason.”
“I know, Nai, it’s just that it’s usually other female bodies that are doing really weird shit for no reason. I can handle those, I know what to do with those. But it’s mine.”
“Oh, shut up. Woman, you’re pregnant. The only thing you should be worrying about is what the hell you’re gonna do if you have another boy, alright? Get some blood drawn, pee in a cup, tell your husband, call me tomorrow afternoon.”
--
Addison softly bites her lip and stares down at the floor and the slight chip in the red polish of her right big toe. She crosses her legs at her ankles and leans against the wall, arms crossed. “Mark.” She looks up and catches his eye in the bathroom mirror, waiting for him to be done brushing his teeth before she says something. “I’m pregnant,” she says with a feeling of relief that she’s finally told him after two weeks.
It takes Mark a few seconds for her words to sink in. He didn’t think he would hear those two words from her mouth again; they had even lightly joked that well, there went the other one when Dylan was born. A smile takes over his face as he realizes that the smile and quiet glow that his wife has worn all day has very little to do with the rather fantastic sex the night before. “You're pregnant,” he repeats.
“I don’t understand it either, nobody does but I am. And hold off on the happiness for a moment because I need to freak out a little and I can’t freak out if you’ve got that goofy grin on your face.”
“I do not have a goofy grin.”
“Yes you do. Now shut up.” She sets her jaw and looks back at the floor. “I’m over forty and, fertility-wise, significantly over forty and I shouldn’t have even been able to have Noah, let alone Noah and Dylan, so this one makes even less sense and there’s a million and one things that could go wrong -”
Mark steps in front of her and places a finger on her lips. “Now you shut up, okay? I’ve known that something’s been bothering you for two weeks but I didn’t push you on it,” his face softens as her eyes avoid his in slight concern, “and I’m not going to yell at you for not telling me because I kind of get it. But you know what? If this little one,” he steps closer and slips his hand under her shirt and gently brushes her skin with his knuckles, “is anything like our two boys - and it better be, otherwise we need to have a chat - it’s going to be fine. Kicking, screaming, throwing baseballs in the house kind of fine.”
Addison nods and wills the tears to stay where they are in her eyes and forces herself to look back at him with a watery smile. “Okay.”
“Freak out done?”
Though she still knows the science and the risks and the impossibilities, her husband’s strength and belief in her (in them) calms her more than any reassurance from any doctor, test or scan. “Yeah. Freak out done.” Her eyes harden as she looks straight into his eyes. “And it better damn well be a girl this time.”
“You look at me as if it’s my fault.”
“Technically it’s your sperm that throws it one way or the other.”
--
“Okay,” Addison breathes as the second week of her second trimester goes by. “Now we can tell people.”
Mark rolls his eyes the moment she turns her back. He understands the first trimester superstition and that it’s even stronger considering her age and the small technicality that she shouldn’t be pregnant at all but that the gag order began at the front door to their house and the handset of a phone, limiting the knowledge to a small handful of people, seemed a little excessive to him. Though it was hard keeping the secret from their boys, he completely agreed with her logic there: explaining that a younger brother or sister is coming is easier than explaining why that younger brother or sister is no longer coming.
“You know,” she cuddles up to Mark on the couch after tucking in their boys and reading them another chapter in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, “I used to really like that book.”
“What happened?”
Addison sighs and rests her head on his shoulder. “I grew up. And the Yellow Brick Road became the gold standard and the Queen of the Field Mice became an acid trip.”
“And The Winkies became Communists. Damn that college.” He sighs heavily and puts down the book of baby names. They bought a new one specifically for their daughter in hopes that it holds insight that the other three do not. “Any name revelations today?” He shifts his eyes over to her and catches her biting her lip with a small smile. “I know that look. What is it?”
“Kylie Marie,” she whispers proudly. When they were at her parents’ house for Christmas, she did some digging and came up with the diary she had planned her life in and in it was a list of names. She mentally high-fived her nine year-old self for coming up with that a few years after the initial dream.
Mark’s eyebrows shoot up, impressed. He tries the name out a few times, letting his lips feel Kylie Marie Montgomery-Sloan and allowing his brain to know how it’s going to sound. “I like that.”
--
Addison reluctantly tears her eyes away from her sleeping newborn daughter in her arms to look up at the soft knock and she smiles widely as she first sees Mark and then their two sons peeking hesitantly into the room. “Come on in.” She reaches out a hand and steadies the flowers Noah puts up on the stand next to her bed and helps him up to sit next to her. Dylan stands at the other side of the bed for a moment looking confused and decides to put the teddy bear on the window sill and does his best to crawl in the small bed with his mother and brother. “There’s room,” she smiles at Mark standing at the end of her bed.
He smiles back at her and shakes his head. There’s no way there’s room for even the teddy bear Dylan brought, let alone him, but he’s content watching his family from where he stands. When Kylie makes a half hiccup/half crying sound, he steps closer, wanting to see how she reacts to her older brothers. By the way that Noah, four years older, looks down at her and into her eyes, he can tell that he’s not going to have to do a whole lot of ass kicking when she reaches the inevitable age when boys start to get interested (and if she turns out to look anything like her mother, boys will be interested and Mark finds himself getting protective even as she’s barely twelve hours old and the only boys she’s met are her brothers). Dylan takes a slightly more hesitant approach and looks cautiously over his shoulder at his father upon hearing words of reassurance that it’s okay to reach out and touch the waving hand of his tiny sister.
They’ve called everyone who needed calling, spoken to everyone who needed speaking to and finally, finally, it’s just the five of them.
A Posteriori :: Invisible Love
Rating: NC-17
Pairing: Mark/Addison
Summary: Opening with Three of Rods (for many, many people) and that really kind of gives away the rest of it.
A Posteriori :: Eppur Si Muove
A Posteriori :: Feel Me Heaven
A Posteriori :: Dreaming of Andromeda
A Posteriori :: Dancing With Mephisto
Addison planned her life out when she was six. Most of her life, actually, the details like where she was going to live and what she was going to do were all kind of fuzzy. She wanted to marry a prince (so she could become a princess and have a sparkly tiara and ladies-in-waiting, whatever ladies-in-waiting did), move into a castle and have three beautiful children. Her only rule was that at least one of the children had to be a girl. That was the family life she wanted and, despite the elementary school dreams of being a renowned surgeon and high school hopes of becoming a wonderful individual who gives a quarter to a homeless kid for the gumball machine and medical school beliefs that she will one day have enough money to own far too many pairs of shoes for her own good, that was her dream to end all dreams. If she could have just that one, that first one - the prince and the castle and the three kids - she would be happy.
She accepted even before her first child was conceived that the three children were an impossibility and politely asked her six year-old self to scrub at the penciled words with a stubby eraser and change it to a vague number and word it so that it didn’t sound like they had to grow inside of her. Her boys are her life and even when she whispers through clenched and frustrated teeth that she’s going to kill Dylan for leaving a toy truck right in the middle of the kitchen again, there isn’t a thing she would change.
“Oh,” she whimpers as Mark pulls his fingers out of her only to quickly slip inside of her and pick up the same rhythm. She clutches at the wall behind her for support but, finding none on the slippery tile, digs her fingers into his strong back instead. “Fuck!” She screams, her head hitting the back of the shower wall as he thrusts into her over and over again, harder with each push.
“Careful,” he chuckles against her neck and circles around her clit with his fingers. “The boys might hear you.”
She gasps when he pinches her clit and bites down softly on her shoulder. “They’re in Boston,” she points out, reminding him that their kids are on vacation with her parents for a week. She’s pretty sure that her mother saw right through it and knew that Addison and Mark needed sex and sleep more than the boys needed a week of being spoiled rotten.
“My point exactly,” he ends their rapport with a smirk and a fiery kiss, pushing her over the edge with a deep thrust and he breaks the kiss just so he can hear her scream.
--
“Hey,” he says softly and takes the bottle of foundation out of her hand and sets it aside. “I like you without all,” he gestures at the mess of makeup on the counter, “this.”
“Yeah?” She sets down the makeup sponge and turns to him.
“Mmmhm.” Mark reaches out and closes her eyes and trails his fingers over the contours of her face. He takes his time, his touch light, examining her and touching everything like he would if she were a patient only softer and loving, searching for familiarity instead of imperfection. He rubs his thumb over her lips and then cups her cheeks, bringing her in for a tender kiss.
Addison’s eyes slowly flutter open. “What was that for?”
“You.”
Her eyes light up and the corners of her lips tug her mouth into a crooked smile. “You, Mark Sloan, are turning into a sap. But thank you.”
--
Addison stares at herself in the mirror once she’s finished with the toothpaste and washed and dried her face. There’s something different yet remarkably familiar about her and she blinks rapidly and shakes her head to get it to go away, blaming the light. She then rolls her eyes at herself and blames it on her eyes still adjusting to the switch from her contacts to her glasses (which reminds her to call her eye doctor and up the prescription in them) and walks out into their bedroom. She silently lifts the sheets and warm comforter and slips underneath, instinctively cuddling up to Mark even though he’s not done with his sentence yet. He raises his arm and pulls her closer to him, whispering to hang on for thirty seconds because he’s almost done.
True to his word, though technically forty-seven seconds, he puts down the book and turns off the light and scoots down to wrap his arms around her and hold her to him as they sleep. It’s hard for him now to imagine a lot of his life before her, but especially this. Especially sleeping together. They rarely cuddled during the affair because it was an affair and he knows that those were the rules but he had never truly slept with anyone, never had the intimate connection that comes from spooning around a woman as she sleeps, until they started again and made the effort. And he thinks he’s an idiot for pretending to be too masculine to want to cuddle before now.
She has a feeling as she curls around his arm looped across her waist, the same feeling she had the nights her boys were conceived. She brushes it off as a silent hope, a wish that her inner six year-old could get the third child - the daughter - she had planned for and pretended and named even if the dream had been rewritten. Mark kisses her shoulder and wishes her sweet dreams and she slowly slides away from that long ago childhood extravagant wish and drifts back into the present, a present in which her only complaint is a dripping faucet in the downstairs bathroom.
--
“Run it again.”
Michelle, Addison’s favorite NICU nurse and usual babysitter of the Montgomery-Sloan children, sighs and gives up on formalities; they’ve known each other since Addison was in her residency. “Addie. I had them run it seven times and it came back positive seven times. You’re pregnant. ”
Addison sits down in one of the comfy rocking chairs of the NICU, too in shock to be overwhelmingly happy. “I don’t understand. I was only supposed to have two. I shouldn’t get my hopes up, this is probably...hey, don’t hit me.” She glares up at Michelle who had given her a light slap on the back of her head. “I could have you fired, old woman.”
“And then who would you have to watch your kids or tell you to shut the hell up and accept that you’re pregnant and give a little thank you to whatever deity you happen to believe in?”
Addison nods and takes a deep breath. “I’m gonna wait a few days before I tell him. Just in case.”
“Girl, how dumb are you? He’s gonna know. And if that ‘just in case’ does happen, you really want to have to explain it all to him then?”
“Why are you always right?”
She smiles softly at Addison. “Because otherwise you’d be horribly misguided.”
--
“Explain this to me.”
“Addison, it’s six o’clock in the morning, I’m dripping wet and the towel’s falling off. This is not the time for you needing me to...”
“I’m pregnant.”
“What? Oh, fuck!”
Addison stifles a laugh as she hears her friend scramble around for the dropped towel. “Why do you take your cell phone into the bathroom with you anyway?”
“In case my best friend feels the need to shock me with impossible news before I’ve had coffee. Where the hell is my bathrobe? And how are you pregnant? You’re lucky you had two.”
She sighs and presses her lips together and shakes her head. “I know! That’s why I called you. You’re the one who told me I only had two. Are you sure you didn’t leave off a zero or something?”
“You doubt my reading abilities, Addison?”
“Then explain it! Don’t get me wrong, somewhere underneath the shock and confusion and fear because I’m forty-three and technically this shouldn’t be happening, I’m happy. I just...” she takes a deep breath and sits down, rubbing her temple with her fingers. “I just need to know whether I should start picking out names and wall colors or if I shouldn’t even tell Mark.” If it’s true, and that she’s about to have a healthy nine months and a healthy third child with no complications, she doesn’t want to risk jinxing it by listing off why it might not be worth saying anything.
“Have them run every single blood test, urine test possible and fax me the results and I’ll see if I can see anything. But, Addie, listen to me. You know as well as I do that sometimes the female body does really weird shit for no reason.”
“I know, Nai, it’s just that it’s usually other female bodies that are doing really weird shit for no reason. I can handle those, I know what to do with those. But it’s mine.”
“Oh, shut up. Woman, you’re pregnant. The only thing you should be worrying about is what the hell you’re gonna do if you have another boy, alright? Get some blood drawn, pee in a cup, tell your husband, call me tomorrow afternoon.”
--
Addison softly bites her lip and stares down at the floor and the slight chip in the red polish of her right big toe. She crosses her legs at her ankles and leans against the wall, arms crossed. “Mark.” She looks up and catches his eye in the bathroom mirror, waiting for him to be done brushing his teeth before she says something. “I’m pregnant,” she says with a feeling of relief that she’s finally told him after two weeks.
It takes Mark a few seconds for her words to sink in. He didn’t think he would hear those two words from her mouth again; they had even lightly joked that well, there went the other one when Dylan was born. A smile takes over his face as he realizes that the smile and quiet glow that his wife has worn all day has very little to do with the rather fantastic sex the night before. “You're pregnant,” he repeats.
“I don’t understand it either, nobody does but I am. And hold off on the happiness for a moment because I need to freak out a little and I can’t freak out if you’ve got that goofy grin on your face.”
“I do not have a goofy grin.”
“Yes you do. Now shut up.” She sets her jaw and looks back at the floor. “I’m over forty and, fertility-wise, significantly over forty and I shouldn’t have even been able to have Noah, let alone Noah and Dylan, so this one makes even less sense and there’s a million and one things that could go wrong -”
Mark steps in front of her and places a finger on her lips. “Now you shut up, okay? I’ve known that something’s been bothering you for two weeks but I didn’t push you on it,” his face softens as her eyes avoid his in slight concern, “and I’m not going to yell at you for not telling me because I kind of get it. But you know what? If this little one,” he steps closer and slips his hand under her shirt and gently brushes her skin with his knuckles, “is anything like our two boys - and it better be, otherwise we need to have a chat - it’s going to be fine. Kicking, screaming, throwing baseballs in the house kind of fine.”
Addison nods and wills the tears to stay where they are in her eyes and forces herself to look back at him with a watery smile. “Okay.”
“Freak out done?”
Though she still knows the science and the risks and the impossibilities, her husband’s strength and belief in her (in them) calms her more than any reassurance from any doctor, test or scan. “Yeah. Freak out done.” Her eyes harden as she looks straight into his eyes. “And it better damn well be a girl this time.”
“You look at me as if it’s my fault.”
“Technically it’s your sperm that throws it one way or the other.”
--
“Okay,” Addison breathes as the second week of her second trimester goes by. “Now we can tell people.”
Mark rolls his eyes the moment she turns her back. He understands the first trimester superstition and that it’s even stronger considering her age and the small technicality that she shouldn’t be pregnant at all but that the gag order began at the front door to their house and the handset of a phone, limiting the knowledge to a small handful of people, seemed a little excessive to him. Though it was hard keeping the secret from their boys, he completely agreed with her logic there: explaining that a younger brother or sister is coming is easier than explaining why that younger brother or sister is no longer coming.
“You know,” she cuddles up to Mark on the couch after tucking in their boys and reading them another chapter in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, “I used to really like that book.”
“What happened?”
Addison sighs and rests her head on his shoulder. “I grew up. And the Yellow Brick Road became the gold standard and the Queen of the Field Mice became an acid trip.”
“And The Winkies became Communists. Damn that college.” He sighs heavily and puts down the book of baby names. They bought a new one specifically for their daughter in hopes that it holds insight that the other three do not. “Any name revelations today?” He shifts his eyes over to her and catches her biting her lip with a small smile. “I know that look. What is it?”
“Kylie Marie,” she whispers proudly. When they were at her parents’ house for Christmas, she did some digging and came up with the diary she had planned her life in and in it was a list of names. She mentally high-fived her nine year-old self for coming up with that a few years after the initial dream.
Mark’s eyebrows shoot up, impressed. He tries the name out a few times, letting his lips feel Kylie Marie Montgomery-Sloan and allowing his brain to know how it’s going to sound. “I like that.”
--
Addison reluctantly tears her eyes away from her sleeping newborn daughter in her arms to look up at the soft knock and she smiles widely as she first sees Mark and then their two sons peeking hesitantly into the room. “Come on in.” She reaches out a hand and steadies the flowers Noah puts up on the stand next to her bed and helps him up to sit next to her. Dylan stands at the other side of the bed for a moment looking confused and decides to put the teddy bear on the window sill and does his best to crawl in the small bed with his mother and brother. “There’s room,” she smiles at Mark standing at the end of her bed.
He smiles back at her and shakes his head. There’s no way there’s room for even the teddy bear Dylan brought, let alone him, but he’s content watching his family from where he stands. When Kylie makes a half hiccup/half crying sound, he steps closer, wanting to see how she reacts to her older brothers. By the way that Noah, four years older, looks down at her and into her eyes, he can tell that he’s not going to have to do a whole lot of ass kicking when she reaches the inevitable age when boys start to get interested (and if she turns out to look anything like her mother, boys will be interested and Mark finds himself getting protective even as she’s barely twelve hours old and the only boys she’s met are her brothers). Dylan takes a slightly more hesitant approach and looks cautiously over his shoulder at his father upon hearing words of reassurance that it’s okay to reach out and touch the waving hand of his tiny sister.
They’ve called everyone who needed calling, spoken to everyone who needed speaking to and finally, finally, it’s just the five of them.
A Posteriori :: Invisible Love