A/N: Thanks again for reviewing. Here's another piece of writing. Prompt was Hurricane.
Five Nineteen
„She doesn't love you like I do. " The voice may only be vibrating softly through the clear Seattle night, but the truth that lay within the statement cut like knife through the layers and layers of denial which had been wrapped around the strong shoulders of Derek Christopher Shepherd in a frail attempt to protect him from a realization that had been long overdue.
Derek looked sympathetically at the woman in front of him with her green shimmery eyes, her damp red curls and her delicate but slumped shoulders. Slowly he eased himself down on the cold concrete in the middle of what seemed like an ordinary November day. He crossed his arms in front of his chest, sighed deeply and turned his head to get a better look at the woman who he had been married to for over a decade and who he had known for close to twenty years by now. Her face still looked the same. Her skin was as pale as it had been the day he had stumbled into her and her best friend one lucky day on Columbia campus. Her nose was still prominent but suited her face and its delicate features as well as it had always done. What he had always loved mostly, though, was her mouth. She could easily get him to agree to do everything she wanted with only one of her big radiant, slightly crooked or rather asymmetrical smiles. And those lips of hers had always been the death of him. Kissing her had never failed to feel like coming home. Even in the hardest and the most hurting periods of their marriage had they never not managed to make him feel secure and right where he belonged.
Only when she was not there; when she was too tired to chase him or too fragile to fight, Derek would lose his confidence and faith. Later he would find himself in a box, her box of a past that she seemed unable to move past and unwilling to forget. With Addison Derek feared he was stuck being someone he simply could not be, an idealistic and naïve portrait of a man that neither could nor would ever exist. In the end it got too hard to try and fight a battle that he had claimed too impossible to win, so he had not waged war in the first place.
Derek took her hand and gently kissed her knuckles as she sighed and let the first tears run down her blemished cheeks and fall to the ground beneath them.
"God, I swore to myself that I would never cry for you again," Addison choked out and turned her head to look Derek deeply in the eyes. Her hair was still auburn, but Derek could make out a few lonely streaks of gray if he concentrated hard enough. Her hand shook lightly as she let go of his hand and placed her own on his lower cheek. Tenderly she stroked along his jaw line and placed two of her fingers on his soft red lips.
"Does she kiss you like I do?"
Addison leaned forward and left a lingering kiss on his awaiting lips.
No, she does not.
"Addie," Derek began, but was soon interrupted by her gentle voice and her soft fingers on the top of his lips stopping him from saying anything at all.
"I know. It's different. Now everything is different." Addison sighed and sat up quickly as she held herself up on her outstretched arms.
"I'm just saying I love you and not in that I-have-a-crush-on-you-and-pretend-to-like-everything-you-do-and-think-you-could-do-no-wrong-kind of way. I love you in a big, life-altering and suicidal kind of way where I know not only the best of you, but more so the very worst of you and I love you nonetheless or furthermore I love you more for every flaw I find in you. You're in a box and that's important, but you will never be gone. Not completely. You are my family still and you will always feel like coming home even when you are married to someone else and will long since have forgotten about me. I made a promise and I have kept it and will do so. I am your wife. The only one you have ever had and you are my husband. The only one I have ever had."
With those last words said into the clear Seattle night, Addison got up and left behind a man that no longer wandered through the soft summer drizzle of Seattle, not through one of those tropical downpours of Venezuela. Derek gasped quietly, swallowing the truth that was drowning him. When Derek realized that he did not only want to be home, he also wanted to come home. There was this moment in his life he would later refer to as THE moment when Derek knew that not only was he missing the girl who he had married on a post-it with a scribbled vow to bind them till the paper may rot, he was also evidently and sorely missing his wife – the only one he had ever had.
So when Meredith left Seattle Grace hospital that day unbeknownst to her, her hopes and dreams – her life with Derek, were not simply washed away by a rainstorm, they were caught, drowned and buried in the deep red hurricane that was Addison Forbes Montgomery formerly Shepherd.
