Author's Note: Due to the kind reviews I received from five lovely readers of my new one-shot, Remember the Debutante Ball, I have decided to write a 'New York' Series. It will be a collection of one shots/short stories circling around Addison, Derek and Mark, either set in New York, or with a strong emphasis on their lives there. Some may lean towards Addison/Mark, some to Addison/Derek, but the pairings aren't really the point of them, it's more in the way of a character exploration, as I think the Addison/Derek/Mark dynamic was woefully underexploited. And don't worry, I won't be abandoning any of my ongoing stories – in fact, I'm plugging away at another chapter of We die on the march and hope to have finished by the end of the week at the latest.
Disclaimer: I believe I may have mentioned before that these characters are not mine, and if they were, they would be dancing to a very different tune.
The tenth anniversary
It was the first time she'd been back to New York since she had thrown a few clothes in a case and followed Derek to Seattle on a mission to save her marriage. Until now, she simply hadn't been able to face the scene of such abject failure, misery and despair. She was slowly forging herself a new life, but she still mourned the comfort of surety of her old one. She might drive past the old Brownstone while she was in the city, just to see it. She wondered if Mark ever did get his bike out of the basement, or if it still sat there, rusting in the damp or was thrown out as trash by the new owners.
The pilot announced they were beginning their descent and Addison clicked her seatbelt on and let her head rest back against the capacious first class chair. She wasn't totally sure why she wanted to go back now, why she suddenly felt ready to face up to it all. The best explanation that she could come up with, when she was trying to justify her sudden trip, was that it "felt right", which she knew wasn't exactly the finest rationalisation that she had ever come up with in her life, but it was the truth. This pilgrimage felt like the right thing to do.
It was September 11th the next day, and ten years since the life of every New Yorker had changed. Even for those lucky enough not to be directly affected by the collapse of the Twin Towers, those who didn't lose family or friends, the very fabric of their lives changed that morning. The identity of their city was permanently altered, and so was theirs. For those like Addison, who had witnessed some of the horrors first hand, they would never view the world through the same eyes again.
Like everyone, she remembered exactly where she had been when she heard the news. It was just one of those moments that would never leave you, like when the Berlin Wall came down, or Nelson Mandela was released, or John Lennon got shot (which wasn't quite as momentous as JFK, but she was too young to remember that). She was in the OR, of course, operating on a woman with a prolapsed uterus. She couldn't stop the bleeding and the patient's blood pressure had been dangerously low when she had heard Derek's voice buzz into the room from the intercom in the scrub room.
'Addie.'
'Kinda busy here,' she had replied without looking up. 'Clamp please. Jesus, where is all this blood coming from?'
'Addie,' he said again, and this time, there was the slightest of inflections in his voice that made a little cold, hard pebble of fear form in the pit of her stomach. It was the exact same tone he had used five years before, when he'd taken her out of a surgery to tell her her dad had died.
She looked up at him, and took in his ghost white features and the horror on his handsome face. Instinctively, she knew that something unutterably terrible had happened and a wave of nausea rose in her throat. The patient started to code.
'Shit. Shit. Another clamp, and hang another unit of O-Neg. And can someone get some suction in there please, I can't see what I'm doing.' Derek waited silently while the patient slipped from v-tach to asystole, and Addison shocked her once, twice, three times.
'Leave it,' he said eventually.
'Don't be ridiculous.'
'Leave it. She's been in asystole for ten minutes, you're not going to get her back.'
'Of course I will. Another round of epi,' she ordered.
'Addie. Stop. There isn't time.'
An overwhelming part of her wanted to carry on working on her patient. She wanted to work until she stopped the bleeding and restarted the woman's heart. She wanted to be able to go out to an anxious new father and tell him that he wasn't going to have to raise his baby son alone, and that his wife was going to be just fine. But most of all, she wanted time to stand still, and for Derek never to tell her the devastating news that she knew was awaiting her.
She looked down at the woman on the table. Derek was right, she wasn't going to get her back. She could flog her for another hour, try more fluids and more epi, but the outcome was going to be exactly the same. She stopped compressions, and stepped away.
'Time of death, 9.03 am. Clean her up,' she said to her intern, 'I don't want her husband to see her like that.'
Derek was waiting for her in the scrub room. She snapped off her gloves and pulled off her bloody gown. She had so much of the woman's blood on her she could smell its metallic warmth.
'What is it, what's happened?'
Derek reached out for her, not caring about the blood. 'It's something… terrible. Big. A plane has flown into one of the Twin Towers.'
She frowned, trying to grasp the meaning of his words. 'I don't understand. What do you mean?'
'No-one seems to know if it's an accident, or terrorists, or what. Just that a plane has crashed right into the building.'
While she was still trying to process the information, Derek's cellphone began to ring. 'Mark?... What, another one? What the Hell is happening?... No, I'm just telling Addie. We'll be right down.'
He carefully put the phone back in his pocket, and pulled Addison into his arms. She seemed to be in shock, and he spoke quietly into her hair. 'That was Mark. It's happened again, another plane. We have to get down to the ER, there's going to be hundreds of casualties. God knows what to expect.'
She nodded against his chest. 'Let me change my scrubs. I'm covered in blood.'
He helped her, then they went down to the ER to wait for the horror to hit them.
