All right, well, this is my very first attempt at Grey's fanfiction, so I'm a little bit nervous. But... You know... This can only be called, I guess, stream of consciousness. There's not really any dialogue and it's all pretty much from Addison's POV. Please read it and critique it but please let me know what you think. I may not be cut out for this fandom... That being said... I'll just let you read the thing...
Summary: It's kind of her thing. Whenever she is faced with emotional trauma of any kind, she dyes her hair. Implied Addison-centric; implied Addek and Maddison.
Rating: T for language and innuendo.
Disclaimer:I'm a seventeen-year-old girl from Oklahoma with no money, no job, and no life. I don't have any television awards, I don't have millions of dollars in the bank from creating an awesome TV show, and I definitely don't know Patrick Dempsey. That being said, please don't sue me. The only thing I have worth taking is my DVD collection and my fabulous Grey's calendar.
It is kind of her thing. For as long as she can remember, she has done it. Whenever she's faced with emotional trauma of any kind, Addison dyes her hair. It had started when she was five and had something to do with Michael Rosenthal calling her ugly. So she had taken a black marker and colored the ends of her hair. And in the ninth grade, she went black after her boyfriend dumped her for her best friend. And when she barely passed a chemistry midterm her junior year, she lived through her embarrassment as a brunette. And so, it only seems fitting that now that her husband has left her, actually, honest-to-God-packed-up-his-things-and-taken-off-in-his-car-and-left-her left her, that she dye her hair. And it definitely has to be drastic. Addison likes drastic. Derek liked to say that Addison was drastic.
The lights in the store seem too bright and her eyes sting as she walks through the automatic doors. There aren't a lot of people and she's grateful because she doesn't want to be recognized when she looks like she does. She pulls the brim of Derek's fishing hat down even further over her eyes and makes her way over to the rows of boxes she's become all too familiar with. She stands and stares at the blurry colors before her. Everyone on those stupid squares look way too happy for her taste. "Bitches…" she mutters and grabs a box, almost not noticing what it is. But Addison doesn't ever not notice anything. That's what got her into this mess.
The cashier tells her to have a good evening. It's all Addison can do to not hit her.
She breaks the plastic seal and dumps the contents of the box in the sink. She unfolds the instruction sheet and pulls on the enclosed pair of gloves. Addison slides the hat, his hat, from her head and fingers the dull red curls. He had loved her hair. Which, she decides defiantly, is all the better reason to change it. She mixes the bottles together and imagines that she's a mad scientist creating a potion that will change her identity. She wishes it were true.
Her favorite movie is 'Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind' because she wants to be like Clementine. She wants to have blue hair and orange hair and green hair and she wants it to not matter. And she wishes that they could erase her memory. She wishes they could erase that awful moment when Derek saw her with Mark. She wishes she could go to bed and wake up and have no recollection of that night. But she knows it's not possible, not yet anyway, and so she just decides that dyeing her hair is about as close to erasing her memory as she's going to come. Like she can leave behind the redheaded part of herself that was stupid enough to sleep with Mark and replace it with nothingness. For once in her life, Addison just wants to feel nothingness. So she takes a deep breath and squirts the mixture on her head. She thinks that first squeeze is the worst, because after you start, there's no going back. And she admits, that's a pretty damn good metaphor for her life lately.
An hour later, a blonde Addison stares at her tear-stained reflection in the mirror and she isn't sure if she's crying because of her hair or because of the circumstances that made her dye it.
Addison decides that she doesn't care what everyone is thinking as she waltzes off the elevator and into her office. They can point and snicker and stare all they want, because she, Addison Forbes Montgomery-Shepherd, is a blonde. And blondes are supposed to have more fun. Blondes are supposed to be carefree and stupid. And, even though she's definitely not these things, Addison can't help but want to be. She wonders what he's doing right now for a moment before she realizes that she really doesn't care. She doesn't care because she's blonde, and damn it, she's going to have more fun and be carefree and stupid for once in her life. She clears her throat after she asks for her messages and sticks her nose a little bit farther up in the air than she usually does when she sees the looks she's getting from the nurses.
When she steps into her office she hears her name and the words "finally cracked" in the same sentence and for a minute she thinks about the mind games she can play with whoever said it, but she quickly recoils because she's blonde now and she's not supposed to be passive-aggressive anymore. Besides, she figures, if blondes really are as stupid as she's always heard, they're probably not smart enough to be passive-aggressive. Actually, they probably don't even know what passive-aggressive means.
By lunch, Addison has decided that having more fun and being carefree and stupid and un-passive-aggressive and just… blonde… is not for her.
She's debating whether she should revert to her natural color or not. And she has several reasons for hesitating. Her hair color has always kind of defined who she is. On one hand, there's Derek, who loved her red hair because it made her unique. It was the first thing he noticed about her and he always said it was the outward representation of her personality, a kind of red flag, no pun intended, to the world. He had loved it, so she had changed it. Then there was Mark. Mark, who fucked anything with a vagina, who had decided that he liked her blonde. He liked blondes, he had said, running his hands through her hair. She had stared at him and decided that she was going to change it again. So, she realizes as she stands in front of all the stupid smiling bitches on the stupid colored boxes, she has three options. She can go back to her natural hair color, Paint the Town, she can keep what's on her head right now, Blonded by the Light, or she can do something completely different and go with Moroccan Night, which, the stupid box promises, will turn her hair a shade of cool medium brown.
No, she decides and slides the Moroccan Night box back into its space on the shelf. Brown is far too common for Addison. She likes drastic, hell, she is drastic. But she definitely cannot stay blonde for very much longer. When she's blonde, people expect her to be sweet and mild and meek. And if were three things that Addison Forbes Montgomery-Shepherd definitely was not, they were sweet and mild and meek.
She makes her final decision replaces the extra box.
Since when has she cared what they thought?
She hates them both, she decides as she sits on the closed toilet, flipping through the latest issue of Cosmopolitan, which normally she would never read, but the blonde hair made her feel all trashy and clandestine and she felt reading the British Medical Journal as a blonde would just be ludicrous. She takes a sip of her wine and lets it wash down her throat. Yes, she definitely hates them both. She hates Derek for making her feel like she isn't good enough and she hates Mark for making her feel like she is. She hates Derek for loving her so much and she hates Mark for loving her more. And how in hell is she supposed to do this? It's been two months since Derek left her, two months since she dyed her hair, and two hours since she crawled out of Mark's bed and decided that she wanted to change her hair again. And it had all been because of the two of them. It was Derek's fault that she had gone and dyed her hair blonde to begin with and it was Mark's fault that she had decided to change it again. Mid-thrust he had buried his face in her hair and whispered that he had always had a thing for blondes. Which, she supposes, should have been a compliment. But there was something condescending in the way he had said it, something about it that just rubbed her the wrong way. So she had waited until he had fallen asleep and then she had snuck out his apartment, driven to the closest department store and bought another box of hair dye. And now here she was, sitting on the toilet in one of Derek's old scrub tops with her hair covered in sticky goo and piled on the top of her head and all she wants to do right now is escape them both. She wants to get away and realize what the real Addison is. She wants to figure out what color the real Addison's hair is. She sighs and wonders how her life got this fucked up.
Her timer goes off so she sticks her head underneath the faucet and washes the mess from her hair. When she's sure she's washed it all out, she combs through the tangles, dries it and curls it the way she usually does.
It's a little darker than normal, but still, it's red. And, Addison realizes as she stares at herself in the mirror, it's her. It's her real hair color and it's what she loves most about herself. With red hair, she can almost forget that her marriage is pretty much over, almost forget that all she is to Derek is a lying adulterous bitch, almost forget that she, Addison Forbes Montgomery-Shepherd, who never messes up, messed up. But, she smiles an Addison smile for the first time in two months, having red hair is the first step. And, she realizes and laughs when she does, suddenly, she doesn't hate them so much anymore.
"Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair
And I eat men like air."
--from "Lady Lazarus"
by Sylvia Plath
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