Viscosity
Summary: In the wake of the ferry disaster, Addison struggles to find herself again among the men in her life. A continuation of my one-shot 'Simple'. Addison/Alex, with strong mentions of Addison/Mark and Addison/Derek.
Rating: T.
Author's Note: Seriously, you guys are the best. I have a thousand and one ideas for this story, so I'm going to keep on going strong, just as long as you guys keep enjoying it.
Chapter 2: He Lied About Death
She liked to tell people she didn't believe in regret, but she believed in it with the absolutism of an atheist, the stark black and white of the revolutionary. She believed in it with all of the passion of a romantic, which she was too. It was always easier—and smarter—to tell people that regret was for fools. What was there to do with regret but wash one's hands clean of it? There was never any way to fix what had already happened. There was simply never any going back.
It was supposed to be a routine surgery. It was a routine surgery. PDA was the most common premature surgery, and it was supposed to be easy. That was what she'd had so many years of training for. This was why she was the head of her own department. This was why Richard promised her everything she wanted and more. It wasn't to fix her and Derek; even Richard wasn't that self-sacrificing. It was because she was that good. In school, she'd always been the first one to answer all the questions. She'd always been on time—no, early, because on time was late and early was on time—and she had never missed a day of work, never missed a surgery, not for anything. Not even the morning after, when the doctor told her to take it easy or risk her own health. She'd just killed her own child, and still she was there to do her job. Addison was a doctor. That was what she did. It was the sum of her parts.
She sat on the gurney in the hallway, her back against the wall, her knees bent and her tennis shoes pressed flat against the black padding. She'd had to get away, but she learned her lesson about hiding in supply closets and crying. Someone would always find her, especially when she least wanted it. So she figured that if she sat in the open, down an unused wing, but in the open, then she couldn't be caught doing anything. Especially not crying. She just wasn't going to cry.
Like any doctor, there were some cases that got to her. She did her best to save lives, and sometimes they couldn't be saved. Sometimes a baby would hold her finger so hard that she was certain it had some life in it left—she hated calling it a her or a him when she was so sure it wouldn't make the night—and then it would fade away. Parents cried. Parents always cried. Even fully grown men. Sometimes it was the men who cried the most. Everyone always cried. When an adult died, it was different. There was sometimes a sense of Well, it's been a good run, but with an infant, there was never any run at all.
Karev had done his best. They had all done their bests—the anesthesiologist, whose job was supremely hard because of how difficult it was to anaesthetize infants; Karev, who had wanted to push onward, and when Addison said that they needed to declare time of death, he looked at her like he didn't recognize her. Like she couldn't be the Addison he knew. She knew how to do her job, but God, if it didn't get hard sometimes.
These were the small, jarring moments of perspective. These were the instances of clarity where it felt so ridiculous to care about anything beyond them. To care about the men in her life—how laughable. How utterly silly, because the truth was that they would probably still be there tomorrow. And the day after, and the day after. Some family had just had their newborn taken from them. Addison looked at her hands, and it wasn't more than an hour before when they'd been covered in the latex of surgical gloves and over that was the paint of an infant's blood.
There was a nick in her palm that she'd gotten from the first time she handled a scalpel. It was a badge of honor, even if at the time it was a mark of humiliation. If only life would continue to leave indelible scars that way—in her hands, to remind her of every mistake, every misuse of a scalpel or a surgical laser or an unkind word or an act of stupidity. If she could see it in her hands, maybe she wouldn't repeat her own history.
What terrified her was there were no mistakes made in the surgery. There was nothing she could have done better. Sometimes people just died. People? Did an infant count as a person? Did it have the decision-making capability, the propensity to hurt, the ability to feel that made it a person? Or was it just on the cusp of its humanity? It all made her head hurt.
Her ankles were cold. She started categorizing what she still felt, what hadn't gone numb in the aftermath. Her ankles, exposed to the cold hospital air by scrub pants pulled up in her position, were cold. Her hands were chapped. Her throat hurt—she couldn't remember the last time she'd had any water. It all reminded her that she still had a job to do. There was no quitting, there was no giving up, and there was no going home for the day. There was also no fixing it.
A sound down at the end of the otherwise quiet hallway alerted her, the whoosh of the opening and closing of the swinging doors, and Addison was glad she wasn't crying when Preston came around the corner, he too still in his scrubs and his trademark scrub cap. To cry in front of Preston Burke, well, that would almost feel like defeat, in the way that crying in front of one's superiors always felt. Maybe in terms of hospital hierarchy he was her peer, but when it came to everything else—ability, stability—he was far above her. He could act superior in front of the interns, even in front of Derek, but he had always been civil and kind to her, which was more than she could ask for. She respected him, which was the most anyone could ask of her.
He crossed his arms over his chest and nodded almost imperceptibly, the tiniest acquiescence, the vaguest gesture that he understood, that he had sat where she had a hundred times. That he just got it. Neither of them said anything, and she stared at the poster on the other side of the wall, an insincere guide through the ways to stay healthy. Addison almost laughed—it was probably too late for anyone who'd be sitting where she was sitting.
"Do you want to come join—" she started to say to Preston, turning her head to look at him again, and she stopped as she saw that he'd brought someone with him, the sound of the entry overwhelmed by the sound of her own thoughts, too loud for this place. It was Karev, who, last she saw him, was preoccupied with scowling at her and accusing her of a half-hearted attempt at saving that child's life. As if there were anything that she did medically that was half-hearted. Karev had so much to learn before he could be a surgeon, and that was something she'd forgotten in the wake of her attraction to him. He was hot-headed and brash and reminded her of, well, a little of her, but it was a her that had existed a long time ago, a her that couldn't exist if she was going to do her job now and well.
She watched the exchange between Preston and Karev, Karev giving Preston a nod of—was that thanks? Maybe they'd come this way, looking for her. Maybe someone had noticed she was gone—which made her think of what Karev had said, that he would notice, but that didn't seem to matter just then. She was angry with him, because he questioned her. Because he made her question herself. Being a doctor wasn't about questions. Being a doctor was about doing what had to be done. Preston's eyes met Addison's, and then he left the both of them alone in the hallway together.
She was ready to bite someone's head off, and it didn't matter to her if it was Alex Karev's or George O'Malley's or, hell, Richard Webber's. Or Meredith Grey's or Derek Shepherd's. She felt ready to attack anyone who came down that hallway towards her—with words of encouragement or words of admonishment, and she wasn't sure Karev would have either. She folded her hands together and rested her elbows on either knee and stared at the poster on the other side of the hall. To stay healthy, get proper exercise, it said. To stay healthy, eat proper meals. Where was the poster for how to stay a healthy baby?
Karev didn't say anything when he got to her. He looked so young underneath the fluorescent lighting, which made her think about how old she must have looked, how battered and bruised, how much his senior. It wasn't fair of her to think that what she'd been through over the last few years, God, over her life, outweighed whatever Karev, at his comparably young age, had been through. It didn't even resonate truthfully. She could see emotional bruises just as easily as she could see the physical subdural hematomas, and Karev had his share of those. He leaned back against the wall, partially blocking her health poster, and he shoved his hands into his pockets, as though waiting for the barrage of criticism. He was never one to accept that lightly—criticism, whether constructive or not, and his apparent readiness to take it surprised Addison.
His surprising her did not surprise her.
"What happened in there?" she asked, sounding tinny and tired, even to herself.
"You tell me," he said, and her moment of thinking he'd sit there and take her being his teacher was gone. There he was, defensive and angry again, and she didn't know who had done that to him, who had kicked him so badly that whenever the foot so much as came out, he kicked first. That was learned behavior. Someone taught him to do that.
"You're here to learn, Karev. And—" And what? And that was a learning experience? It wasn't a learning experience. It was a child's death. It was a child with a name—Helen Salinger; it was a child who existed, and now she did not. It was a learning experience, sure, but it was also a death. It wasn't up to her to humanize the patient for her intern. It was up to her to teach him what he needed to know so that he could go out into the world and do the things she'd done but better. She hadn't stopped learning yet herself, however, and she knew it. It was like a new tear in her palm, a new scalpel mark. She could feel it even if she couldn't see it.
She pressed the back of her hand against her mouth, debating her imminent word choice, and Karev watched her with the angry eyes of someone a decade her junior. "And if you have a problem with that, you can go back to a specialty where all you learn is how to order coffee."
Plastics. The unsaid word hung in the air like a brick. 'Go back to Mark,' was what she could have said, but someone said that to her once and broke her more pieces than she had hands to carry.
"Someone died back there," Karev exploded after the split-second processing it took him to grasp what she'd said. "A newborn died, and you're going to sit here and talk to me about your ex-boyfriend?"
"People die all the time," she said, and her own voice was getting increasingly louder. It was her natural response to people raising their tone with her—bite her and she would bite back. He had no right to speak to her that way. She was the one with the years of medical training behind her. She was the one who knew what she was doing. She was the attending. He was the intern. "People die all the time, and it's horrible, and we have to—"
"Oh, shut up, Addison."
She was too stunned to do anything but. Karev had detached himself from the wall and crossed his arms over his chest, and Addison didn't know what it was that made him turn Alpha male suddenly, but she liked the change. And then she hated it, the backlash of his anger, the way he was speaking to her like she was his peer or his underling. Like he was the doctor and Addison the intern.
"Did you just—"
"And you know what? I've lost a patient. I didn't just get here."
"Did you—"
"I know what it's like. I know people die. I know it doesn't get easier. Everyone always says that. But you just held that baby, you just held Helen in your hands, and we were taking care of her yesterday, and then that's it. You call it, and you walk out of the OR. And then I yell at you, and you walk out of there too."
He took a deep breath and waited for her reaction, but she was still struggling to find one. She wanted to ask him who had done this to him, turned him into someone so fearless and so afraid all in the same breath. And she wanted to tell him not to talk to her that way. She was torn between wanting to get off of the gurney and going to him, wrapping her arms around him and telling him that whatever it was that made him so upset, well, she was going to fix it. But that just wasn't for her to do.
What was for her to do, and she had to keep reminding herself of this, was keep him on the surgical straight and narrow. This was Izzie Stevens' territory he was delving into, the land of being too involved, and Bailey would have Addison's head if she didn't straighten Karev out. This was Bailey's intern. But he was Addison's too, and the surge of protectiveness was overwhelming. She didn't know how to keep him from pain like this. She didn't know how to tell him that there was a reason she was sitting alone in the hallway, her ankles cold, her hands hurting, her throat dry. She just didn't know.
"God damnit, would you just react to something?"
She blinked. She reacted to things. She reacted to plenty of things. Didn't she? She knew she did. She wept like a baby when Derek tossed her out of her own home. And she cried for days afterwards too, sitting around with a tub of ice cream, daring her body to swell up and get fat. Go ahead, make my day, she was saying with her Ben and Jerry's. She reacted then. That was a reaction.
"I react," she said, and Karev raised his eyebrows to say, 'sure you do.' "What do you want me to do, Karev?" There was her voice, getting even louder, and she could feel the surge of Addisonness kicking in like a dangerous adrenaline rush. Most people knew better than to get her going. Alex Karev had apparently not learned that lesson yet. She moved off of the gurney to put her feet firmly on the floor, and there was Karev, expression still smug, arms still over his chest, daring her to do something. "Do you want me to sit here and cry about every person who comes onto my operating table who doesn't make it back out again? Do you know how many people die in this hospital every day? Do you get that? And it's not about you or me. It's just not. So get over yourself. Get over this. Clean up. Move on. Because if you don't? You're never going to be a surgeon."
That came out of her mouth like a slap, and when it hit Karev's face, it clearly stung. And she hated that she did that to him, but there wasn't anyone who was going to stand in front of her and question her professional integrity. He took the smallest of steps towards her and unfolded his arms as though he might touch her, and then her pager broke the sound of silence. Karev blinked and shook his head and said, "Deal with that." It sounded like capitulation, but his mouth split into that half-smile she knew so well. It only took a second for her to glance at her pager, but that was enough for Karev to turn and go.
…
"The danger comes in caring for them, you know," Miranda said over lunch, and at first Addison didn't know if she meant the patients or her coworkers. Karev had it all wrong. She reacted. She reacted too much—she reacted with the knee-jerk reaction that was Izzie Stevens' reaction to Denny Duquette, or Karev's response to what had been their Jane Doe. "And that's why you're sitting here at my table, steam still coming out your ears. So when they mess up, you take it personally. Trust me, I know. And they mess up all the time."
Addison pushed her green beans around her plate and stared across the cafeteria to where the interns sat, like it was a private club, but it was one of the hardest private clubs to belong to. Their lives weren't their own. Everything they did was under the microscope of people who had too much education and too little social interaction. Karev hadn't so much as looked her way since she'd come into the cafeteria, and there he was—with Stevens, O'Malley, and Meredith Grey. He was sitting closer to Stevens than Addison was entirely comfortable with, but that was certainly his prerogative. He was allowed to do whatever to whomever whenever he liked. He was allowed to do that. And as far as she could tell, he was making faces out of Stevens' mashed potatoes and peas, and he was allowed to do that too. He was an attractive young man in the prime of his life. And she—well, who was she to stop him?
"He didn't mess up. Nobody messed up. It was just something that happened."
"People die all the time, yadda-yadda," Miranda said, and she looked at Addison like she wasn't convinced. Miranda then turned to look at the interns' table, and they responded in kind by straightening up to look presentable, especially Stevens, who still had the most to lose, and when she looked back at Addison it was to say, "Are you and Karev—you know."
Addison, mouth full of green beans, nearly choked. It was funny, the way everyone's mind immediately jumped to that, as though sexual tension could be the only reason an attending might be frustrated with an intern. How low they'd set the bar, Preston and Derek. In fact, the bar was destroyed. Any set rules they'd had about hospital behavior were gone. It was Sodom and Gomorrah all over again, and the most anyone could hope for was that God wouldn't strike them all dead.
"No," Addison said, setting her fork down next to her tray. "We are not. There was an incident this morning involving a surgery, but we're not. No, we are not. We're not. There's no sex here."
"I was just asking if you two were okay, but clearly there was my answer." Addison looked at Miranda, whose eyebrows were high on her forehead in a cool expression of silent disapproval, and yes, thought Addison, yes, there was her answer.
…
"I like that I can get you angry," Karev said from the doorway of the neonatal ward. She hadn't heard him approach, and she wasn't expecting him back, not this shift, maybe not the shift after. She'd once told him that she hoped Sloan didn't break him down, but maybe she just wasn't any better than Mark. She sometimes thought that was why she disliked him so much—being confronted with her mistakes and her own personality flaws on a daily basis was trying at best. And then when Karev's voice came from the doorway as Addison stopped to adjust the intubation on Baby McEnroe—as yet unnamed, the parents still too afraid they might lose him—she thought that maybe Karev was stronger than she gave him credit for. Maybe he couldn't be broken down by either one of them. "I like that fight in you," he added.
She finished the reintubation, and then she turned to look at him, her arms crossed over her chest. The anger had dissipated, her frustration with him giving way to weariness, and those were things easy to accommodate in his absence. The afternoon was spent in paperwork, and she could forget about him then too, imagine that she was better off without him, that whatever it was they were entering into was a bad idea, that Mark, really, was what she deserved. And then when he stood in front of her in his civilian's clothing, his leather jacket with the faux fur around the collar, his black undershirt, it seemed just as easy to forget that he was an intern or a bad idea or any of a hundred other things she'd told herself about him. He wasn't the bad boy. He wasn't Mark 2.0. He was just Karev.
He smiled at her crookedly, and she couldn't help smiling back. There had been no irreparable damage done. They could yell at each other and still come back for me. That was already proven to be true, at least within the realm of their jobs, and with the line between professional and personal so blurred, it seemed to hold true for them as people too. There were times when her thoughts about him were rough, awkwardly sexual—her sex life had revolved around two men for the last several years, and she felt rusty, even imagining him naked. Her mother would have blushed to think of the full-fledged fantasies she had just of how it would feel to have Karev's hands, rough from only God knew what, on the most tender expanses of skin. Hell, forget her mother. Addison blushed to think of it.
And yet, for as heady as her daydreams sometimes became, she thought of other things too—and looking at him in that doorway, she wondered if he was the type of man to ever let her help shave him. She knew how intimate it was to let one person press a knife against another. To risk someone else harming you, that was a sacrifice. To give them the blade with which to do it, that was another.
And she knew too that what she felt for Karev was based in lust, infatuation. She hardly knew him, and if she was lucky, all of it would fade into the rest of things that she categorized as good ideas at the time. That would certainly be the easy thing, but Addison knew her life and the way her heart worked, and easy was not usually her way out.
"Well, I've got plenty of it," she said, and she did, lots of fight, enough to last a lifetime. It was what kept her going, that fight, what kept her strong and together and with it, even when she didn't feel like it.
Both of them waited, maybe on the other to say they were sorry, but she wasn't an apologizer, and she'd never known him to be one either, and she turned back to the incubator to look at Baby McEnroe. "Come see," she said to him, and she slid her hands into the sealed crib. The newborn reached for her hands, still unable to see properly out of its squinted eyes, but it seemed to know she was there. "He's so strong already, and his parents still don't want to name him."
She could feel Karev behind her, his warmth close enough for her to be cognizant of, and she thought for a second that his hand brushed over the back of her lab coat. She must have been imagining it, and she dismissed it just as easily as she experienced it. "Maybe they don't want to get too attached to something they can't keep," he said.
Ain't that the truth, Addison thought. She'd once given a child a name, a child she couldn't and wouldn't keep, and she knew the way that giving something a name or a label or even articulating it at all made it real. Her child had never once been anything but—but there was a difference between mourning her unborn, unnamed child still in its first trimester and mourning someone with a name.
When she looked at him, he was looking at her and she realized maybe that wasn't what he was talking about at all. If it was her he was thinking of while looking at her so intensely, she wanted to tell him that he could keep her—that she wanted to be kept. But she couldn't assume. He'd been the one after all to tell her that not every man who looked at her wanted her. But still, there was something in his expression.
He looked for a moment like he might kiss her, and she panicked and looked back at the baby. The panic came bubbling out of nowhere, like an anxiety arising about an unknown problem, a worry at the pit of one's stomach about nothing at all, but she looked at Baby McEnroe with his tiny baby fingers that had once been blue from lack of oxygen, and she said, "He's so beautiful."
"He really is," Karev said, and he moved closer to her, close enough to be touching, and if she turned to look at him, they'd be so close they'd have to kiss. The idea of it terrified her, and she realized it was because it counted. Because she wanted it to count. Because she wanted it to be their second proper kiss, and she wanted to remember it four years later when they were celebrating anniversaries. And—oh, went her brain, that was where the panic came from. It came from making plans.
"All babies are though."
"All babies are not pretty," Karev said, laughing a little. "There are some really ugly ones."
"Dr. Karev," Addison said, but she was laughing too, and she forgot for a moment how close they were, and when she turned to look at him, pulling her hands from the incubator, he hesitated only a second before leaning in to kiss her. And it was nice and warm and perfect, and everything she wanted it to be, including his hand sliding in between her dress and lab coat to pull him closer to her, but the panic was supreme. When she pulled away from him, the panic was in his eyes too, and she put her hand to his cheek to say sorry, I'm so sorry I passed that on to you.
"Is this not okay?" he said, and his voice was husky and betrayed him.
"God, how could it not be okay," she said, and then she cursed herself, because that was the sort of thing meant for the recesses of her brain only, places no human beings were allowed to go—but it was too late. There it was, in the open, articulated, with a name, and Karev leaned in to kiss her again, this time with the sloppy imprecision of an eager man. Her fingertips ran over his jaw, the edges of his five o'clock shadow, and as his kiss pressed deeper, she had to pull away—for breath, for re-gathering, for perspective.
He looked at her, confused but not hurt, and his hand stayed at the small of her back, holding her close. She got it then, not wanting to get too attached to something she couldn't keep. It wasn't that he couldn't keep her, she realized—it was that she couldn't keep him, not in good conscience. She was damaged goods, and maybe he was too; it was likely they all were, in their own ways, but what she deserved and what he deserved were beasts of two different orders.
There'd be no telling him that though, and she pulled him in to kiss him softly. When she withdrew again, it was to say, "I have to go take a nap in the on-call room or I'll never be able to stay for the whole shift."
"Let me come with you," he said, but there was laughter in his voice, as though he hardly expected her to acquiesce to him.
"God, if only you knew how much I'd—" Again, something that belonged better in her brain, and she shut her mouth to keep the rest inside. His eyes met hers, a silent laughter behind them, and she pushed him away a little and said, "Go home, get some sleep. Tomorrow will come early."
"Yes, ma'am," he said, and his smile was contagious—but not diseased. No, it was the best thing Addison had seen in weeks.
…
The light of the on-call door opening woke her up before the hand brushing hair off her face did, but it was only the latter that made her open her eyes. She couldn't have been out for more than twenty minutes, and she reached for her pager, muttering, "Did I miss a page." The light from the open door vanished as it crept shut, and the voice in the darkness wasn't that of a nurse coming to get her for something urgent, as it usually was.
"I moved in with Meredith and Izzie—since George moved out," said Karev, and his hand was exquisitely warm against her skin. She was dreaming, she decided, because there was no other way around this scenario in her head. A to B to C, that was how things worked with her, and this, at best guess, was Q, and there was nothing else around it. "And they're, like, mad women. Can I just—crash here with you?"
She couldn't see him, not in the darkness, and there was too little light coming under the door for her to bother letting her eyes adjust, and she shut her eyes again. His hand moved to her shoulder and then down her lower back, and he leaned down to kiss her cheek and said, "No funny business, I promise."
"Just don't push me off the bed," she muttered, as though it was the most natural thing in the world for him to crawl onto the too-thin mattress with her. Besides, it was her dream. She could do whatever the hell she wanted.
"If I do, you can hit me."
"It's a deal," she said, and she buried her head under her arm. The springs of the bottom bunk creaked under his weight as he slid in with her, and his arm found its resting place around her hip. There was something warm near her nose, but she was too tired to place it, and when he spoke, she realized it was his mouth.
"Go back to sleep," he said, and that was all she needed.
To be continued.