Sorry I couldn't update sooner!
The sun rises gloriously through the clouds, golds and reds and pinks filtering through the window, loghting the silence.
He's still sitting aimlessly in front of her, on the wicker glider; she's on the rug, legs curled under her. They don't speak, each of them in their own bubble.
It's like they're trapped on their own private island of grief, in this house, locked in together until they can flee. She sneaks a look at him under her lashes, taking in the pain etched on his features.
That was what startled her the most, in the first weeks after Julia died. The utter absence of pain. Of anything at all, actually. She felt nothing, insulated in a world of her own, drifting. She felt nothing while they cremated her child. While she stood in the wind and scattered handfuls of ashes. While she packed her daughter's things, shipped ththeir lives back to New York. Through it all, she was numb, as if she had just plunged into icy water, perpetually in that brief second before her skin registered the cold, before it set her nerves on fire and crushed the air from her lungs.
But Derek, he felt it all. He cried when they left the hospital, silent, almost invisible tears. He spent the two weeks at home reading to Jules, playing with blocks, painting, he took long showers with the water pounding and his eyes would be red. When she died he was the one who tried to save her; she's the one who prised his hands off their daughter's chest.
And after, when he spent his days at the bottom of a bottle, red eyed and sharp tongued, she went blank and mute. She looked at her husband of nearlyna decade, her partner of far longer, and she felt nothing. Not his pain or his grief or his anger, not when he accused her of being heartless, not when he accused her of being the reason their child was dead.
She looked at other parents more closely now, the fear in their eyes when she spoke to them in that dreaded calm voice, laced with pity like poison. She watched the way their faces cabed inward, collapsed under the weight of their loss, when she broke bad news. She watched the naked outpouring of grief, the noisy sticky messy tears and the clinging need for comfort. Maybe, she thought, they did it to lessen the weight of their guilt.
Guilt at being alive, at being able to breathe and talk and laugh and live while your child, the being who you conceived and carried and gave birth to, rocked and sang and nursed and loved, the person who is half you and half the person you love, is dead. Irretrievably, irrevocably, gone.
You can help them Vivian said to her, watching her watch them. You understand them. You know what it feels like.And so she did. She couldn't cry, couldn't mourn, couldn't seem to express her grief the way the rest of them did. So she did what she could. She took the fellowship.
He looks at her cautiously, but she isn't paying attention, twisting the colorful fringe of the rug around a bare finger.
He can't seem to breathe without the cold heaviness in his chest, the incurable guilt.
Even now, knowing that nothing would have saved Julia, he feels it. The factnthat he cannot do anything about it, that he is helpless against the force of nature that bereaved them, makes him furious.
At least Addison chose to do something. It tooke her away from him; at the moment, it felt like a betrayal, like she was running from the havoc she'd wrought, but now he understands.
He likes to plan, to think, to deliberate. He likes organisation and order and schedules, everything always the same perfect, neat rows of tasks and results. Addiso is a doer. Always has been. She takes everything by the horns, plunges headlong into situations he would soespend hours pondering.
She chose to channelise the grief that he realises now she must have felt into something good, something that could spare others the torment that they faced.
He's watched her operate, of course. Watched her save lives of children and adults like their daughter. He wonders if he's a bad father, for not doing the same.
The case that should have been Addison's last, in Seattle; Bailey's favorite patient, the one she begged Addison to help, he watched that surgery too. From the gallery, never longer than a few minutes. He left and didn't return when it got bad, when they started discussing acidosis and hypothermia and the moniters started beeping. He died.
He looked for her, afterwards. He knew she'd be shaken, like she always seemed to be, dry eyed and stiff after she lost one. He couldn't find her anywhere, and it took nearly an hour to track her down at the inn.
He recalled her standing in front of Meredith and him, at the elevators, her hair pinned up loosely, dressed in black like she was grieving for something - she always wore black those early days in Seattle, he's never asked why - her eyes glittering.
Can I join? she asked. Or are you not into threesomes?
He found her in her room, not an ounce of fight left in her, crying soundlessly. He'd felt...better, although that's almost sadistic. Watching her shake, wracked with pain, it made him feel like she was finally sorry for what she'd done.
Even though, deep down, he'd known she was right. Jules deserved to go happy, in her own home, tucked up in her bed with her parents. He sees that now.
"I don't mean that." he says, his voice hoarse. He clears his throat, swallows from a glass sitting on the end table. It's flat and cold, a faint film of dust floating on the surface that he can taste in his mouth. "What I said earlier, about -"
"How I killed Julia?"
He actually winces at the venom in her voice, at how it's directed not at him, but at herself.
"You didn't."
She eyes him like she expects to be wounded, like she's anticipating pain. "Derek, our marriage ended because you hate me. You hate me for killing our daughter. You've been very clear about that."
"I -" he swallows again. "That was inexcusable. I'm sorry, Addie, but I know you did what was best for her."
In the NICUat Seattle Grace, standing over the tiny narcotic-addicted baby in the incubator, watching her breathe, grasp his wife's finger, each fingernail tinier than the diamond that still glittered on the rings he'd put there, he told her to let go. To not get attached, because it was the right thing to not operate. He thought they should let the baby go in peace.
Addison wanted to fight. Roles reversed, each trying to atone for the mistake the other thought they'd made. That baby lived. He watched the social worker take her away, maybe to a new home. She wore a tiny yellow hat, instead of the regulation pink and blue striped ones. He wanted to ask Addison if she'd given it to her. Did he? He can't remember.
All he remembers is that Addison was supposed to leave, that she was supposed to let that preemie go. But she stayed. For almost a year, when she could have turned on him and gone with Mark, when she could have been happy, she stayed.
And again, when Jen died. Richard - he's known them since they were engaged, he knows the bones of their marriage, the weak spots - called her, but she didn't have to come. She left behind her recuperating brother and her patients and her practice, her whole life, to come drag him out of a mess he was responsible for - and that he blamed her for.
"And I don't hate you," he says honestly. "I don't think I could."
"That's nice to hear." she smiles tiredly. "You don't hate me. Lovely."
"You came." he says, curious. "You didn't have to, but you did. Why?"
Why did she come?
Well. She's forty two years old, lives alone. She has nothing and no one, except a cat and her cranky, healing brother who has lrobably moved out by now. She's gone through more than four decades of life with no ties, nothing more permanent than friendship and colleagues lingering with her.
Almost two of those four decades were spent with Derek. He's the one who's knows her longest, lived with her longest, longer than even her parents or Archer. He knows the way she likes her coffee in the morning, the exact temperature of her shower, the brand of toothpaste she uses. He knows her inside and out.
He's the longest relationship she has ever had. He's almost all she has left, the only remaining proof that she had a life before all of this.
Why wouldn't she come?
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