It was strange how it would come back to him, a kaleidoscope of shifting memories: soft touches, loud laughs, long sighs and piercing accusations. Loving someone was possibly the most difficult thing there was in life. So many ways to love: selfishly, wholly, slowly, patiently, fiercely, endlessly... and he loved her every single way at least once... and sometimes twice.
People were allowed to love more than one person in their lives.
In theory, but in reality was that true?
He loved Meredith, he did and there were moments when he was sure that he had made the right decision.
But there were so many more, agonizing ones when he was sure he'd made the worse mistake of his entire life.
If he could do it all over again, if he wasn't so stupid, so young and so proud he could have had it all. He would have told her all the things that got caught somewhere between his throat and mouth: I failed. I loved you more than I loved myself and hated you all the same.
I loved him more than my own siblings and despised him all the same.
Mostly though... I failed... he would have led with that because he had. He'd failed so epically, so tragically and so many times with her that he'd lost count. She was the self-fulfilling prophecy, the thing that he wished for, received and then decided to destroy.
Her name was like nails on a chalkboard, her perfume like ashes in his mouth.
Meredith wore it once.
A year ago, she'd come from home from some boutique she'd visited with Christina, walking in the door and he could smell it rooms away. It was New York, little Italy, cold noodles, hot sex, small apartments, soft kisses, low moans, sweet words and loving touches.
She'd smelled like Addison, sitting wrapped in a bed sheet with red-rimmed glasses on the windowsill of their one-room bedroom apartment in medical school. She smelled like Addison on the coast of Maine, in a 93' Jeep Cherokee with boxed wine, cold cuts, Bruce Springsteen and deep red lipstick on his Polo shirt.
Meredith carried the memories of white silk, cheap carnations, and drunken Mark Sloan.
Long wedding speeches, a shy Addison, the Cranberries, too many whisky waters, dry scotches and the best wedding reception he'd ever seen.
Meredith smelled of a brownstone; love, regret, passion, indifference and cold tears on an autumn night.
When she embraced him, he thought he'd vomit. He had to hold his breath, close his eyes and pray to a God he'd long stop believing in for relief- that he'd stop wishing to see red hair, pale skin, soft curves and hear quick, biting sarcasm when he opened his eyes.
Her name would come up in casual conversation, five years later, two words and he would feel like the whole world had crashed into some invisible force, lurching them all forward at the speed of light only to run headlong into steel and ice:
Addison remarried...
Derek thought it would all be over, that they could all go back to their normal lives after Mark was gone. His best friend died and all he could think when he'd looked down at his white, stiff, embalmed corpse at the viewing was that it was over. The question "who did she love?" was finally done- never to be revisited but it would never be over.
It would take a thousand corpses, a million deaths of Mark Sloan- the only brother he'd ever have and love, to end that question. They had both ended with Greys, loving similar women.
However, was it because they wouldn't have the real woman they first loved?
This was how they had chosen to settle the ultimate game, the final challenge, the real thing both of them really cared about: "who loved Addison better?"
They would mend their friendship, throw a hasty bandage over a lifetime of regret, love and want by committing to two sisters, similar in personality and neuroses and slut shame and dismiss the one forgotten but so close that both could still taste her perfume, see her smile and feel her touch at any given moment.
To love and hate- to want and regret, to need and despise, she was a litany of descriptions and decisions. Addison was the ghost that walked across newly varnished floors, hands running across freshly painted walls- not leaving a mark in the house he'd built as a monument of love and promise to Meredith.
She would find him in his dreams.
Not once a week or even once a month.
It could have been once a year and it was still so damaging that he'd wake in sweat and want, sadness and hatred. He'd have these damning dreams and not be able to look at Meredith all morning for he'd feel like the village idiot left on display, a man caught with his pants down, Judas with his 30 pieces of sadarhin silver guiltily weighing down his pockets with the betrayal of lady Jesus- Addison, whom he'd meant to follow so devotedly, so chastely and blindly but he'd failed.
"Please don't go..." she had begged him as he left her by the front door. "Don't go" and "Don't stay as you are" was really her ultimatum.
That was what killed them: pride, the fall of all mankind, the denial of defeat.
He was once the man that knew her every breath, every look and loved every smile.
Then he was the stranger that showed up on Tuesdays for dinner, had awkward, ill thought out sex on Thursdays and felt regret on Fridays.
What did he want?
For her to say she was wrong?
For Addison to tell him that he was right: for her to submit and quit, to stop making more money than him, to stop being more important than him or more put together?
He wanted it all, selfishly, sickly and stupidly.
He wanted pride and lust but had forgotten the two falls of his catholic educated youth and would pay decades after for such a silly lapse in memory.
Mark Sloan... his brother, his friend, her lover and everything Derek wasn't.
Mark Sloan loved her fiercely, passionately, sometimes slowly but always consistently.
He loved her long past Lexie only he wasn't stupid enough to deny it.
Mark was dead and he was alive... happy, healthy but many times oh, so... so deeply lonely.
It wasn't until a conference in LA, one of those three-day events with speakers from places like Israel, Munich, Mass General and Seattle Grace, that he realized not only had he missed the boat but he'd seen paradise and found himself soon after lost. She was standing at the bar of the Hilton, green dress, black heels, long curly red hair and a lifetime of memories.
She'd asked the bartender for a Scotch, single malt, dry.
He made some comment about Scotch nights and blinding mornings and she laughed, long, loud and unashamed.
He saw her and after two kids, ten years of marriage and what he thought in the summer of 06' would be a perfect life, all Derek Shepherd could think was that he'd died and gone straight to hell.
Hell wasn't the Catholic fire and brimstone of his youth.
No.
It was green dresses, long legs, auburn hair, red smiles and that perfume.
She was the devil in black of 06' and in the fall of 16', green.
Fifty and she could make him feel like he was 25, with glasses, thin and practically a virgin.
She should have never loved him.
She was always too good and he was always too foolish but she just did the same.
Fingers curled around the high ball glass, hair falling over her forehead as she generously tipped the bartender that leaned a little too suggestively over the counter.
Addison Adrianne Forbes Montgomery loved him before he was filled out, confident, sexually experienced, a Neurosurgeon, McDreamy and every other thing women seemed to think was so important.
She loved him because he could do square roots of seven-digit numbers in his head, he loved Star Wars (but wouldn't admit it), held her hand at random, who touched her like he was dying and had daddy issues before it was a psychological coined phrase that made a person in- Vogue and interesting.
She loved him because he was himself, broken, strange, weird and lovely just as she was and unashamed.
Addison, his Addison- the quirky, fragile, explosive, intelligent, passionate, loving, calm, considerate, consistent and desperate for affection, wife was kissing a different husband with that same perfume that he'd know even in death and right then, Derek believed in God, Hell, kismet, and karma all at once.
"Hello," it seemed to echo across the room as he said it in his mind but never out loud. Perhaps he would have. He would have made some grand entrance, his own devil in black or blue slacks as it may have been, but he was cut just short of a perfect moment.
"Hello..." He crossed the room, the unfamiliar, dark, attractive man in perfectly pressed slacks, a white collared shirt with dark, full Russell Crowe hair and a gold wedding band called out to his Addison. She smiled, swivelling on her seat, legs spreading ever so slightly as he filled the gap, stepping between toned legs, kissing the lips that Derek had once known so familiarly, once thought of so intensely.
This was hell and this was God.
To show what could have been and what was missed.
To know what was given and so quickly taken away: the fall of the pride, the bottomless search for lust.
Addison remarried...
echoed throughout his mind and he knew then that it was never her mistake, it was never her fall but his own.
She had searched for forgiveness and found bitterness.
She gave love and found indifference.
She sought affection and received hatred.
They were the thin line between love and hate.
And Derek Shepherd forgot to tell her that it was always more the first than the latter. That it would always be cold noodles, soft touches, red-rimmed glasses, loud accusation, cold tears in autumn and perfume that he'd love and remember.
You were allowed to love more than one person in life and he did but he only craved one, he only needed one and he'd only ever miss, regret and dream of one Addison Adrienne Forbes Montgomery.
It wasn't the chase. It wasn't pride, lust, regret or memories. It was her... it would always be her that sent him cowering into dark corners of hotel lobbies, waking in sweat at night. Listening for creaks on wooden floors of a brownstone long sold, searching foolishly for handprints on walls long dried and waiting for the smell of perfume on sheets that had long ago dissipated.
Derek Andrew Shepherd loved twice in his life.
One was simple, still dramatic, full and peaceful and the other was selfishly, wholly, slowly, patiently, fiercely and endlessly.
He loved her every single way at least once... and sometimes twice.
He loved Addison Adrienne Forbes Montgomery after... It was only once... and still beyond...
Addison remarried...
Derek loved her from compulsion, decision, destiny and free will. He loved her because he knew no other way. He loved her in regret, memory, dream and reality.
He loved her till he died.
He loved beyond death.
Some loves didn't work out, not because of fate, circumstance or even Mark Sloan.
They failed because of pride, lust, foolishness and youth.
But they lived because of love... long past the fading of perfume.