If Nothing Else

AU. Maddison. Songfic. Mark looks back on a much longer and happier life than Shonda gave him. With Addison.

Disclaimer: I don't own anything.

I used The Script's "I'm Yours" for this fic. Ever since I first heard it, probably about 5 years ago, I've thought of it as a perfect song for Maddison.

It's very AU, but I have drawn from a number of the storylines they were involved in in Shondaland, so you should see some parallels.

Enjoy!

March 7th, 2058

You touch these tired eyes of mine
And map my face out line by line
And somehow growing old feels fine

He's not sure he's even got the energy, anymore, but she's Addison, and she's been his Addison for the last 70 years, so he puts his arms around her, however many muscles in his shoulders cry in outrage as he moves his arms, however blank her face remains, not really seeing him. And she hasn't really been seeing him for the last eight months, but she's still comfortable in his arms. Somewhere in her mind, which has been riddled with developing dementia for almost a year now, she knows that there's something right about being in his arms. She hasn't appeared scared. Not yet. The doctors have warned him that one day she might not remember him to the degree that she'll be scared around him, but she's content at the moment. Though she doesn't say anything, he thinks she quite likes him telling their story to her every morning, and he never tires, telling it. They've been so far, over so many years, that it almost feels like he's boasting of an achievement whilst he recounts it.

"I've got a story to tell you…" he begins, slowly, gently, judging her every day to see if she'll still receive it so well. She gives him a little, unexplainable, slightly nervous smile. That'll do.

He begins.

He'd been friends with Derek for years, but they'd been distant one summer, and when they'd met back up when the term began, he had a smart, sassy redhead attached to his arm, and he introduced her without blinking an eyelid, as if he had no fear Mark would be any sort of competition to him, here. It wasn't like that love-at-first-sight cliché, they hated each other those first few weeks, Mark and Addison, they couldn't say anything but a cross, derogatory word to one another, they couldn't see the world through the other one's eyes. Mark saw Addison as a rich, spoilt type, with everything always handed to her on a plate, and Addison couldn't see past the man-whore exterior, the fact that Mark always had a different girl on his arm, what she translated as a total lack of respect for the opposite sex.

But Addison was Derek's girl, and Mark was Derek's best friend from childhood, so they grew to tolerate one another, and there even came a time when they could be left alone in a room together and find something to talk about, or they could see each other in passing and stop to catch up.

She was still Derek's posh girlfriend, and he was still Derek's slutty friend, but everything was shifting.

They'd been together just over a year when Derek went on a summer work experience placement in a hospital in Seattle, and he came home, and he wasn't the same.

It was only a few weeks in the end before he sat down with Addison and fed her some crap about just not feeling the same way anymore, and he thought maybe they'd grown apart.

She never did anything by halves, and she screamed at him until she didn't have any scream left in her anymore, and then she stormed out of his college flat building, slamming every door she possibly could on her way down to the ground floor.

When she got out, she stood in the rain for a few moments, wondering what on earth she was going to do now. Things like this didn't happen to Montgomerys, they ended relationships, and things like this certainly didn't happen to Addison Forbes Montgomery.

She had a few straight vodkas in the local bar, and then she turned up on Mark's doorstep, her hair soaked, her eyes dark. By sheer chance, he was on his own that evening, and by less of a chance, ever since he'd started to tolerate her, there'd been some inkling of desire in the back of his mind when he looked her in the eye. He took her in his arms, then.

It didn't occur to him to ask what was happening with Derek. She'd become his weakness without either of them realising.

She woke up in his bed, and for a moment, in that state of half-awake in the transition from sleeping; she rolled over and expected to see Derek, before all the memories started flooding back. There was no doubt she'd had great sex with Mark the night before, but her serious boyfriend that Bizzy and the Captain approved of had ended everything with her, in a serious, sensible tone of voice… she didn't think he was going to change his mind. And she'd had too much to drink and ended up in Mark Sloan's bed, in Mark Sloan's arms, and she didn't think she had any sort of excuse for that…

His eyes opened then, and for a moment he looked at her the way you'd look at a wild animal, without moving, completely unsure what they were going to do next.

"Derek broke up with me." She started, in the end, and that wasn't the sort of thing Mark wanted to talk about, right then, in his bed, so he wrapped his arms around her and started kissing her senseless, and she didn't have it in her to argue with that.

They started just being about sex, then. Sure, they had quite a lot to talk about between the covers the nights they spent together, but it was casual, it was relaxed. They didn't let Derek know they were casually together for a few months; they both thought it wasn't going to last, it was going to peter out to nothing, but it didn't. And when they told Derek, like a final blow to anything Addison had ever thought of their relationship, he didn't seem to mind.

Though my edges may be rough
I never feel I'm quite enough
It may not seem like very much
But I'm yours

Those first few years, those last years in med-school, they were very back-to-front. On paper, they never would have fitted. Bizzy and the Captain had made it clear from the word go that Mark Sloan was never going to get their approval, and if Mark's parents had been existent in his life anymore they would have frowned and made some sarcastic comment about the 'stuck-up little posh girl he was shacking up with'. When they fought, every time they gave it their all, every time they both thought that was the end; that was their relationship, that stupid little combination of two polar opposites, over. But it never was. They always wound up having fantastic make-up sex, and none of their issues actually being resolved, just being brushed under the carpet.

They graduated together, and by that time they were almost steady together. She was looking to walk into an internship in New York, and they'd gotten a little flat in Manhattan, when he dropped the biggest bombshell on her he ever had.

"They offered me last week… and I think… I've been thinking about it… I'm going to Somalia… they offered me doctor in a platoon, I-" he stopped, but not because she interrupted him. The words were falling flat on his own ears.

She told him she loved him as she lay in his arms the night before he went, and she'd told him before, but somehow there felt like something more final in it then, and for the first time in his life, he spent an entire night not wanting to do anything but hold her.

He went to Somalia with his platoon, she fast-tracked through her internship in the hospital in Manhattan, and then she moved to another New York hospital in her residency, already thinking of attempting to specialise in neonatology, obstetrics and gynaecology.

He came home when he could, and every time he did she couldn't help hoping this would be the last time she'd meet him at an airport, having spent weeks without news, weeks wondering what was going on out there.

In the end, it was nearly two years before things started to settle, and he was discharged from his platoon, left to search for a job at home with everyone else, suddenly and rudely thrown back into normality.

He had something else he needed to do first. If all the death, carnage and suffering he'd seen had had any effect, it was this.

After his final military plane set down, he walked through the airport slowly, every possible muscle aching, his heart beating double time, not exactly in fear, and certainly not in apprehension, but in some sort of nervousness, some sort of insecurity.

He already had the ring in his hand, he'd spoken to someone at base a few days ago, and they'd delivered it to him as he took his first step down from the plane.

She was standing there, in the waiting room, looking more tired than he'd ever seen her, antisocial shifts in the NICU in her hospital taking their toll on her, worry etching lines into her skin.

But when she saw him, her eyes lit up, and he remembered it was her eyes that he'd noticed first, possibly even her eyes that he'd loved first. And she came clattering into his arms, handbag and all his gear falling to the floor, and she was crying, which was an immediate sign she's not quite in control of herself around him, because Montgomerys don't cry in public.

And then he was holding her at arm's length and there weren't any words, but her crying seemed to increase tenfold when he held the ring out to her, but she was crying through a smile then, and then she started kissing him, and nothing was said, but somehow that was a yes.

He had his head deeply buried in Addison's hair, and then Addison's neck, so he didn't think anyone would have been able to see, but he shed a few quiet tears too.

They were married in Antigua in the end, with a small audience, and Derek was Mark's best man, which did make him smile slightly as Derek's girlfriend was the first thing Addison had been to him, and Naomi, Savvy and Callie, a friend Addison had made at the hospital were her bridesmaids. They both would have thought it would have been strange, having Derek there, but Meredith, his long-term girlfriend, soon-to-be fiancé was there in the audience, and Mark and Addison had never said a word about it, but Meredith was based in Seattle, had been on placement in the hospital that summer before Derek had broken up with Addison, and they'd gotten together relatively soon after Addison and Derek had been over.

But that didn't matter, and that wasn't ever going to matter, because they were dancing their first dance, in the sand, and the sky was clear and the sun was shining, and everything was going to be alright.

Everything was in the right place.

That night, when all the guests had long since retired, they sat on the beach; toes in the sand, heads leant together.

"Who'd have thought, that day Derek introduced us, that this is where we'd end up?" he gave a little laugh, pressing a kiss to her hair. "I don't think you liked me at all, those first few weeks…"

"Try first few months!" she laughed, turning her face to his. "And we still fight like it's to the death, Mark… on paper, this is probably the stupidest wedding, the stupidest couple that there's ever been…"

"But I love you." He said firmly, pressing his lips against hers, kissing away the little ironic smile.

In that moment, it was enough.

He started a residency in the same hospital she was working in, considering specialising in plastics, which made Addison smile, because there was something about working in plastics that would bring Mark the ability to continue fixing the brief, quick repairs he'd done on the front.

They were happy, but they were busy.

It took a few years to start to really show, but then she was working on her medical genetics fellowship, and he'd skyrocketed to plastics attending and he was teaching at more and more seminars all over the States, and suddenly they didn't see very much of each other, any more.

They lived in their perfect little brownstone in their very nice neighbourhood; they even had a cat; they both earned ludicrous amounts of money and had an unhealthy number of letters after both their names.

It was strange, really; when they hadn't made any sense together at all on paper everything had been perfect, and now they added up nicely and ticked all the boxes and perfect seemed to be falling away.

In some irony, it happened to both of them the same weekend. Mark was in Nevada on a plastics convention, and Addison was in Los Angeles, commiserating a recently divorced Naomi. Addison ended up flying solo, drinking too much on a night out, and bumping into and ending up in bed with her best friend's ex-husband, and Mark ended up in an on-call room with a nurse, after making a number of unanswered calls home, having forgotten his wife was taking the weekend away.

One thing they always had, however, was honesty; Mark arrived home in the brownstone on Tuesday night, debating how he could possibly plead his wife's forgiveness, and she was sat, in tears at the breakfast bar, and the only words that came out of her mouth were: "I cheated."

They weren't the same after that. They had marriage counselling, they worked through all their issues with a psychiatrist, they even cut their hours down and made a solemn promise that this wasn't going to happen again, but they weren't quite the same.

They tried, and maybe they were even convincing themselves that everything was back the way it had been, but it wasn't. Not quite.

But times were hard, and they muddled through, and then they were welcoming Ella into the world in January 2007, and she was a baby born into a broken family, but they smiled, and she made them keep smiling, the next few years, with her crop of red hair from her mother, and those deep grey eyes from her father, and the silly little things she'd say.

Ella had a brother three years later, little Jack, and he was another bundle of perfect, but they were firing on more cylinders than they had, they hardly passed each other in the corridors at the hospital these days, and two little children were making them tired. Too tired.

Mark was staying in Seattle with Derek, Meredith and their hoard of Shepherd children for some teaching he was doing in Seattle Grace Hospital, and Addison was consulted for a complex fertility case in Naomi's practice in LA, and although they'd both sworn it wouldn't happen again, things shifted.

Ella and Jack were staying with their Aunt (for all intents and purposes) Savvy and their Uncle Weiss back in the city, tearing around in the garden with their children.

Meredith's sister came over for dinner, and she was doe-eyed and flirty and couldn't hold her alcohol when they went drinking after, with a couple of Meredith's friends, and she was exactly what would have been his type what seemed like a hundred years ago, before Derek had ever introduced him to his red-head girlfriend.

Addison was assigned to work with fellow fertility specialist Jake Reilly, and he was tall and dark-haired and so utterly different to the husband she never saw, and he was flirting.

They both ended up in other people's beds that night, and they both woke up hating themselves, possibly because neither of them felt that they had quite enough guilt.

It was a few weeks later before either of them felt the need to say anything. Addison had just come down the stairs from putting Ella and Jack to bed, and Mark was sat in the kitchen, two generous measures of whiskey on the table.

He looked up at her, and she thought she could read something she couldn't quite understand in his eyes.

"I think we need to talk, Addison."

There was silence for a moment, but then she nodded, and took the seat and the crystal glass opposite him.

"I think so, too."

It came out in their worryingly civilised discussion that night that they'd both been with other people, and neither of them had been able to be sorry enough about it. It came to the surface that they both felt alone in the marriage, they both struggled through problems with the children, they both didn't feel they could find anyone when they needed their spouse.

Possibly hours later, Addison looked up at him through tear-filled eyes.

"Mark, is this marriage over?"

He visibly winced, but then he shrugged his shoulders, as if he didn't have the slightest idea anymore. "We gotta try to stay together for the kids, haven't we? Even if this isn't working anymore… Jack's not even two yet, he won't… I don't think we should…" he trailed off, because he'd run out of reasons they ought to stay together.

But Addison thought the children were good enough reasons, for now. And somewhere inside she couldn't help hoping that Mark had been so quick in coming up with a reason because he wasn't quite ready to let her go, yet.

The next few months were hell on earth. They clashed over everything, almost as badly as they used to in their first few months together, and they hardly had a civil word to say once the children were in bed, blissfully oblivious to the whole thing. Mark took to sleeping in the spare room every night now, she ceased to remember what the other side of the bed being warm felt like, and it seemed impossible to recall all the good times they'd ever had together.

And then, one morning, they got the phone call that shifted their whole entire world.

The day news came my best friend died
My knees went weak and you saw me cry
Say I'm still the soldier in your eyes

It was Meredith, barely understandable through her tears, but Mark managed to get out of her that there had been a plane crash with some of the Seattle Grace surgeons involved, and it had killed Lexie outright, and claimed Derek's life a few hours later.

He dropped the phone, then, and he started crying. Addison spun from the doorway, and suddenly the months, the years of unrest between them have dissolved.

"Derek's dead." He managed, and then he was burying his face in her shoulder and her arms were around him like no time had passed at all, and they were still sat in the sand in the early hours after their wedding, with their whole lives ahead of them. She put her arms around him with the ease they'd always had, before everything started to go wrong, and she pressed her face into the top of his head, letting the tears leak, unnoticed, from her own eyes.

"I got you." She breathed, every inch of her body shaking, nothing seeming quite real. "I'm here."

And she was, after that. She held him together from that moment, through everything, and however it affected her, too, she could see that he was the one teetering on the edge of collapse, he was the one that needed saving.

She let him squeeze the life out of her hand at the funeral, and she kept hold of it as he went to speak to Meredith and the four fatherless children at the end of it all, helping him keep him shaking under wraps.

The day the news came that there were financial changes and they were renaming the hospital the Shepherd Memorial Hospital, she wordlessly took him in her arms and pressed her face to his neck, praying to a God she didn't even know if she believed in that he'd find his way out the other end of this, eventually.

About a year later, Meredith phoned, and Addison could hear the tears, saying that little Josie, the youngest, had confessed to her mother that day that she wasn't sure she could remember her father. True to form, Addison held up for the rest of the phone call, consoling her friend, but when it was over, and she was only faced with silence, she started crying. Really crying, because she hadn't cried enough over the last year about the whole thing, and it seemed once it started, it wouldn't stop.

She hadn't stopped crying when Mark came in from the late shift to find his wife sobbing her heart out in the middle of the kitchen floor. He lifted her in his arms, wordlessly, and carried her up to the bed they'd taken to sharing again, wiping her eyes and whispering "I love you"s in her ear.

As he moved away to leave the room, where Addison was tucked up in bed, she caught his hand, and looked up at him through those eyes he'd fallen in love with all those years ago.

"We're going to be alright, aren't we?" she whispered. And when he nodded, he was only realising it at that second, but he supposed they were.

You healed these scars over time
Embraced my soul
You loved my mind
You're the only angel in my life

And they were. Mark started his own private practice with more flexible working hours, and Addison cut down her shifts at the hospital. Ella thrived through school, always laughing, always working hard, and when she announced at the end of high school she wanted to be a science teacher, neither Mark nor Addison supposed they were surprised. Jack struggled more in his earlier years, but a great deal of help from both his Mom and Dad and a highly paid math tutor, he managed to get past the difficulties. He took up the piano in middle school, and there was something natural there. Turned out he could write music quite well once he started understanding it, and Mark hadn't ever supposed his son would become a musician, but he couldn't have been any prouder.

Ella married Kyle, another teacher, and Addison and Mark danced at the wedding like it was their own, and in that moment, that sunlit afternoon in Antigua didn't feel so far away, anymore. Jack was in casual relationship after casual relationship, and Addison wondered if he'd ever settle down, but in the end he was taken in to an NYPD precinct to talk through the murder of one of his composing competitors, and he ended up falling in love with and slowly seducing Carrie, a hard-as-nails murder detective.

Ella had three boys over the next ten years, both to her own joy and her mother's joking sympathy, Michael, Daniel and Thomas, and she gave them all the middle name Derek, not at her mother's request, nor even really remembering the man, just the feeling that he was someone that needed to be remembered. Jack and Carrie had a great deal more difficulties, struggling with fertility issues and a number of miscarriages, and in the end, they had to admit defeat.

They waited on the adoption register for nearly five painful years until they were given a little girl of three with peachy pale skin, blonde hair and green eyes, called Julia.

Mark and Addison kept thriving, both took early retirement, giving them a chance to travel and see the sights they'd always wanted to see, talked about seeing but never gotten round to it, and then they'd settled nicely into their later years in another nice, if smaller, brownstone, slightly more set back from the city.

It was just before her ninetieth birthday that Addison got sick, so Mark always told himself they had a good run of the whole thing, and they were moved into sheltered accommodation, and then further on to completely assisted living as everything got worse, she started getting more and more confused.

Ella and Kyle and the boys would visit alternate weekends, opposite Jack, Carrie and Julia, and once a month they'd all come together, and despite their mother not remembering quite exactly who they were, they'd make her smile and the children would make her laugh, and on good days she'd even have some inkling that she ought to be proud of them, Michael was nearly seventeen by then, and provided he got the grades at school, he wanted to go into pre-med.

It wasn't easy, Mark telling her their story every day, wondering when the day would come that she'd remember absolutely nothing, but he was always going to, as long as the two of them stayed on earth.

Because she was his Addison, and he'd never have found another woman quite like her. Another woman who would have caused him both all that happiness and all that pain, and ended up by his side until the end.

And though I may not look like much
I'm yours

Mark sighs; the woman in his arms has her eyes closed, she's sleeping softly. He's not sure how long she's been like that; he's not sure how much of the end of the story she actually heard. But he supposes, sighing and tucking the bed covers around Addison's shoulders, it doesn't really matter, he'll tell it all again tomorrow. And the next day, and the following…

He presses his lips gently to her forehead, and she stirs slightly in her sleep, rolling over, but her eyes don't open. That's the day over; again, he'll be starting from square one in the morning. Everything he's fed into her mind today will be almost completely gone when she wakes up.

Almost. Sometimes he thinks there's something hiding there, under the surface. Once she breathed Somalia when he started talking about his time in the army, and one time she'd corrected him on the type of flowers there'd been at their wedding. There's still something there, however small it is.

He'll hold onto that, if nothing else.

He leaves the room, heading for his own bed – she can't wake up next to a man she doesn't know very well, not these days – giving himself a small smile.

He'll tell her the story again tomorrow.

I'd really love a review, however short, whatever it has to say! I think the Maddison fandom's dying, I didn't get a thing for my last fic, and you do feel really let down as a writer if you don't hear anything back! I don't want much, just a few words from anyone who has time :)