A/N: So ... this is old-school, vintage-style Maddison - the result of a prompt that I'll tell you at the end and my constant, futile attempts to make sense of the Season 1/2/3 timeline. Spoiler you all probably know: there's no real way to make sense of it. It really only makes sense if Derek was gone from New York for more than two months, so I took the "we lived together for two months" and the overcoat Derek wore in the flashback and this story grew out of that. It's complete, and I'm posting all of it tonight in a handful of chapters, which will vary in length.
This is a Mark/Addison story. Fans of that pairing, enjoy. If you don't like that pairing, you'll find plenty of others on my page and everyone else's. As always, thank you for reading.
Posting tonight to stop myself from overthinking it. Rach, you inspired this story and, let's be real, all my Maddison. Happy late and early birthday.
Break My Fall - Prologue
He has this theory that it's all about the calendar.
You could say a calendar is how it all started and even if it didn't that's how he'll remember it: in squares of time crossed out in black.
Pages flipped between months and pictures that change with the seasons. Frozen airbrushed shots of flowery springs and glowing summers and perfect white winters that look nothing like his memories.
When did it start? What he knows is that it was cold. Unseasonably cold.
(He was forced to take three credits of college English for pre-med and scammed his way into an upper-level creative writing course, mainly because the TA was – coincidentally, also – hot. She told them, never start by talking about the weather. No one cares about the weather.)
But if he were the kind of guy who kept track of this stuff – which, first of all, he isn't, that's Addison's area, cataloguing and scrapbooking and memories – he would break it up like that.
Seasons.
Which means he wouldn't be able to talk about it without the weather. That first blast of unseasonal cold that killed everything new. And the sticky summer that followed: holding his breath past garbage piles and steaming subway grates, her blouses stuck to her ribs with sweat and the salt that would gather at the dip of her collarbones.
Maybe that's why he kept the calendar long after he stopped needing it. Long after it lost its relevance.
(December 31, every year, a calendar becomes nothing more than a memory.)