I want to thank everyone that has stuck with me so far! I know I've been negligent lately, but summer is here and I have time to myself again! Since the last update I've moved halfway across the country, sent my spouse overseas, started working on my bachelor's degree again, and got on the Dean's list. It's been a wild ride! So I hope you'll forgive me for making you wait so long, and for leaving you with so much uncertainty. I plan on publishing more chapters this summer, and as far as this story goes we still have quite a journey! This chapter is a little different, but I like it. Think of it like halftime, or an intermission in this story. Just a chapter looking at where Derek has been in this AU, and how different his life could have been.
Derek Shepherd was married for fifteen years to the woman he considered the love of his life. They met over a cadaver, assigned to dissect and label the dead man's anatomy in a cold room in the basement of the medical building across from the university hospital. They bickered and jabbed at each other with mean-spirited jokes for five weeks in the sterile white room with the too-bright lights. They got nauseous from hours of inhaling formaldehyde, and Derek talked his infuriating lab partner out of speaking to the Dean about the health hazard of forcing them to keep such hours with toxic fumes. He reminded her that they wanted to become surgeons, and that surgeons should expect to face much worse than repulsing their roommates with a stench that refused to wash away.
Derek endured the woman on the stool across from him in the dissecting lab for weeks, making fun of her myriad last names, giving her hell about her trust fund, until one night before midterms when he asked her to go to the bar with him after class. He rationalized that he wanted to get his friends off his back, to show them that he didn't spend all of him time alone in his room reading. When she said yes he was a little surprised, but not unhappy, and they walked across the cold, dark campus to the little bar downtown. His friends liked her well enough, and she could drink cheap beer almost as well as any of them. When her friend showed up later to take her home and Derek's best friend couldn't stop grinning at the tall, dark stranger Derek knew he would be seeing more of these women. That night he guided her toward her friend's car as she stumbled and swayed, her body warm under his protective arm. He covered her head so she wouldn't knock it on the frame, and with his big palm on her hot red hair he spoke to her quietly. "Goodnight, Addison," he said, smiling.
Their first kiss was in a stairwell, halfway between the third and fourth floor in the building where they first met, the closing words of an argument not completely out of Addison's mouth. He kissed her until she swayed in his arms. He took her bag and walked her the rest of the way to class, handing her the strap outside the door, and they didn't fight for three hours after that. It was a new record. He started calling her Addie that day because she hated it.
By the time they moved in together they were finished with labs and cadavers, so they avoided the noxious odor trailing back to their new home. The only furniture they had the first night was an ugly futon couch that could barely hold the weight of one o f them, and when Addie began to fume about the arrangement Derek tore into their boxes, flinging out blankets and sheets and winter coats, throw pillows and childhood stuffed animals, and as she began to grin he scooped them up and piled them in the middle of the room. They could make it work, he was convinced, and he showed her how in the tumble of fabric in the middle of the living room floor. They got in a fight that night about dinner, about where to order takeout and who was going to pay, and Derek smiled to himself as he walked to the Chinese restaurant down the block with the money from her wallet, every point he had made discounted.
They were married after graduation and before residency began. There was no way they would have the time or energy for a society wedding once they were interns, so they gave in to the strange unreality of a cathedral packed to bursting with pastel flowers and white satin and half of the East Coast's elite. Derek's mother had been worried about the cost and the trouble, but Derek assured her that it was taken care of. He would owe Addie's parents until the day he died, but it was worth it to give this woman her dream.
There had been stolen moments in the weeks before the wedding, nights at Mark's apartment with the ugly futon that had found a new home with him, or at Sam's when Naomi was out, where Derek would sit with a notepad and his guitar and try to put the years with Addie together. He didn't have high expectations for his friends keeping their mouths shut, but he watched Addie's eyes widen as he took the mic on their night and played her song. It was clumsy and barely rhymed, and in parts even juvenile, which he blamed entirely on Mark. He smiled as he sang, the tears springing to Addie's eyes, and then a drunk Naomi in her long gown, high on the power of being maid of honor, took Addie's hand and led her out to dance. The two women sang along with the final repeat of the chorus, and Derek could hardly keep singing when Sam and Mark joined in. His friends linked arms and swayed as he played them out, and when he was finished the band began to play the song for the first dance, and Derek swept his new wife off her feet.
Derek wasn't sure, years later, that he could even remember residency. The first year was a blur, the boxes that he had packed with Addie after the honeymoon never totally unpacked into their tiny apartment near the hospital. Each year got better, and as time went on and he honed his skills he fell more in love with the career he had chosen. Many nights he wondered why he even had an apartment as he dozed off on a hard bed in an on call room, his arms wrapped around his sleeping wife. Sometimes their schedules didn't line up at all and they only saw each other in the hospital, running in different directions, chasing their very different specialties. Addie joked that they would make the perfect team, that with their friends they could have the whole body covered. Derek dreamed of a time when he could have dinner with his wife that didn't involve lukewarm casserole from the cafeteria.
At the end of their fellowships Addie began to mention conversations with her parents about starting a practice in the city. She had her trust fund to cover them until they made a profit, and they could pay back the loan from her parents within five years. Derek had spent the previous five saving every penny to pay off one day for his wife, but he smiled and nodded and they only had one argument over it that week. There was the inescapable fact that he was enamored with the idea of being a neurosurgeon, making his own rules, his own hours, breaking new ground, saving lives all on his own. Whether he did it in a hospital or a swank office in a high rise didn't matter.
Late at night, when he had to put away the flash cards because his eyes couldn't focus, he let himself relax and felt the doubt creep into him. He had spent the last two years invested equally in research and surgery and he didn't know which he loved more. The reality of it was that his passion lay with solving problems, with facing impossible odds and going to the lab to find ways around it no one had tried before. In those last two years he had worked on the problems the attendings had given him, had solved their problems, but he itched to find his own puzzles, his own terrifying tumors. He wanted to make history, wanted to get grants and conduct trials, but there was no room for that in Addie's plans. He hadn't made a decision, not officially, but his wife was going ahead, talking to her mother on the phone at all hours about locations and rent and budgets. She had begun talking about which of their colleagues to poach once they were seeing patients, which doctors would build the strongest roster. Addie dreamed out loud to him every chance she got, and he felt precious little chance to change his course now. The plan would make him rich, he knew. In five years, maybe ten, he could fund small projects on his own, or he could partner with his alma mater. He could always make a change later if this wasn't for him. He could always turn around if he needed to.
Opening the practice came with the same pomp as their wedding had, with photographers and press and an honest-to-God red ribbon that he and Addie cut with comically large scissors. The first year was nearly as much managerial wrangling as it was medicine, and as soon as the pressure let up he was reminded of the bottom line, of the need for simpler, quicker procedures to pad their budget until the practice began to thrive. Three years in and Addie was taking him to look at pre-war buildings near Central Park, and for the first time he had the feeling of having too much money. They celebrated their independence with champagne and sex that night, and Derek made silent plans to start practicing the kind of medicine he loved as soon as he could find a way.
There were moments in those next two years where Derek wondered who he was. He was nearing forty and his career was clipping simple aneurysms, installing shunts, and avoiding his wife. They shopped for Christmas presents together, walking past the stores, talking past each other. They spent holidays with his family, which he appreciated because his swarm of sisters swallowed his wife whole, reminding him of his work days where he smiled at her in the hallway, caught in conversations with others, only to sneak into bed long after she was asleep. Those nights he slept easily, knowing that he did not have to fear a fight, not that they fought much. It was the feeling he had near her, the tenseness he saw in her shoulders when she saw him, the way she tipped her head down and her voice lowered, her words coming out at a different register those times that only he could hear. He didn't want to argue, didn't want to let it slip that he hated the practice that he never chose, the life of weekends in the Hamptons spent with the sort of people who liked to talk about the latest development in yachts. He didn't want to say that he was tired of pretending that he liked the life that he had been given. He didn't want to seem ungrateful for it.
Derek ducked out of work early one afternoon and met with the Chief of Surgery at Columbia, the first serious lead he had in his search for research facilities. He sat in the back of the dark cab on the way back to the brownstone, playing absently with his favorite blue tie as traffic slowed, wording his explanation to Addison in his head. He sold her on the articles he would publish, the journalists that would come calling, the spreads of him in his office. His suit would fit him just so as he leaned back against his desk, the breathtaking view rolling out behind him, a smile spread easily across his face. He would look good for those pictures, fit, a little tan even though it was winter, at ease with himself and the world. Over coffee and bagels people would see him, his shining smile, read about how he was changing the field of neurosurgery and they would want him for their daughter, their nephew, their own very special, very tragic case. It would be the sort of business flow they could only dream of.
If he pulled this off, he would have to find someone to train, to mold into an image of himself. An eager young intern, perhaps, who he would pluck from the lab and teach all his secrets, who in time would be able to perform a surgery start to finish just as he would, as if they could read his mind.
Outside the door to his brownstone he had a feeling. Inside, he knew he should have followed that feeling back to the office, back to ignorance. He was home early, which was actually quite late, to catch his wife before she fell asleep. He had caught her; she certainly wasn't asleep.
After Derek went into his bedroom to satisfy his need to see for himself, Mark took off out the front door in unfastened pants, his lavender dress shirt flapping out behind him. Derek could hear him hailing a cab through Addison's shouts. She ended up outside as well, standing in a pile of her clothes that he had tossed on the stoop, before he let her back in and let himself out. He was done trying, done pretending, done telling himself that things would be different. He wasn't interested in working on his marriage anymore.
Derek was amused, in a dry sort of way, with what money could buy. Men had gone to his house and packed his things and put them in storage, then gone to his office and done the same. Two boxes, they said, would be waiting for him at his destination. He had no interest in spending his first days in a new city shopping for a new wardrobe, so he had the contents of his dresser and his closet shipped across the country. He could buy new things later. On the plane the flight attendants told the passengers to turn off their phones, but Derek's was already dark and silent in his leather satchel. When he finally stepped out into the Seattle drizzle he took his first deep breath in a week. It felt small in comparison to New York, but he guessed that most places would. The important thing was that it felt different, from the moist air on his skin to the way the wind drove the fog from his brain. Different was a possibility here.
He drove at night. He tried to not think of his single-handed destruction of the environment as he burned tank after tank, filling up his little rental sedan at strange, glowing gas stations. He drove until he knew the neighborhoods, the steep hills, the names of the winding roads. He took the ferries and stared at the water. He drove loops around the islands that hovered off the edges of Seattle, rolling down the windows and sucking in the damp, clean air. He drove until he saw a sign pounded lopsided into the shoulder of a dark road, spattered with months of mud. He wiped it with his shirt sleeve to find the words "For Sale." He wiped further to reveal a phone number. Then he got back into his car.
He didn't drive for long. The low clearance of the sedan couldn't get more than twenty yards up the drive, and when he got out again he knew he would have to push it back if he wanted to get to the hotel that night. Instead he walked through the mud and weeds until the trees drew away from the little dirt track and he was standing in a wide, dark clearing. The fat moon came out from behind a cloud just as he reached the far end, and he knew at that moment, the glistening grass bending in waves around him, the trees whispering and swaying, that he would never be able to call any other place home. When he reached the trees to see the sparkling lights of Seattle beyond them, he knew the view to greet him every morning.
At dawn, in the now filthy confines of his rental car, Derek wrote down the providential sign's number on the back of a gas station receipt. He would have to get something a little bigger, and easier to clean, if he was coming back. Just like that, he began to fashion himself into something new.
The night before his first shift, after talking to his old mentor, Richard Webber, and then the chief, he walked over to the little dingy bar across from the hospital. He felt like he needed something, some push, some motivation to get through this new life. He sat at the bar all night, not sure what he was looking for, but he left slightly drunk and alone, and the feeling that something wasn't quite right was still with him in the morning.
The first day, with the interns gathered in the conference room to help him with a case, he saw a little blond woman sitting in front, staring intently at him. The feeling she created in his stomach made it hard for him to pretend to be the hot shot attending the interns believed him to be. He tried to find out more about her all day, only to meet Richard in the hall that evening and find himself being formally introduced to her. Meredith Webber, Richard's daughter and the most well-born future surgeon on the west coast, and completely impossible. She was the furthest thing from a fresh start he could imagine. Even though she smiled sweetly at him, flushing slightly as they shook hands, every bit the kind of awe-struck student that did it for him, he made sure that his acknowledgment had a hint of a gruff edge. Richard nodded in the background.
He had a chat with Richard later about the boundaries that were necessary with so many eager young people fighting for their careers. Richard told him about the scandals, the men looking for easy prey, the women looking for power over someone, all of them long gone. Derek shrugged off Richard's questions about Addison. He hadn't even let her explain herself after her half-sobbed apologies outside his front door that night. He didn't want to go back.
Every time he saw Meredith Webber he felt the anger in himself grow. She was just like any other woman, any other intern, but whenever he saw her he couldn't look away. He felt a shiver when she was near, a trembling awareness. He could hear her laugh over the din in the cafeteria. He began to eat in his office, alone, his eyes on the patch of parking lot beyond his window. One afternoon he saw her walk to her car through that window, holding the hand of another intern, kissing him goodbye before she got in her car and drove away. He requested a new office, and despite Richard's attempt to reason with him he traded another attending for what was objectively a worse space, windowless and dark, just big enough for his things. His lunches were spent staring at the wall, the notes he left himself forming a rectangle on the wall, another barrier between him and the memory of her.
Six months later Addison showed up in the lobby as he was leaving, and he almost sighed with relief. She charmed away his anger, as she had a way of doing from the days they spent studying together for shared classes. He fell into the old habits easily, and he wondered why he felt the need to stop.
Eventually the ground breaking work fell away and he spent his days on the same simple procedures he had left New York to get away from. He went home early, listened to his wife, planned for the next day that was the same as the last. He grew older and did his best to forget that he had other plans for his life, bigger plans, dreams of headlines and photo ops and the adrenaline of life or death decisions. Heads or tails, he thought sometimes. He wanted to be the man who followed his gut.
Instead he mumbled his greetings and took the stairs instead of being trapped in a tiny metal box with the one resident who wouldn't get out of his head. She was still kissing the same man, giggling with him in the halls, gossiping with her friends. Derek didn't understand why she wouldn't leave his thoughts. His wife was about to give him the family he had always wanted, but all he felt was dread. Addison made the guest bedroom next to theirs into a nursery straight from a catalog, the little blankets matching the curtains, the fabric diapers folded into perfect squares on the changing table, the tiny clothes from the showers folded and tucked into the dresser he had carefully bolted to the wall. Everything was how it should be, except in his head. In the quiet moments, alone, he couldn't keep out the picture of his happy family that he had imagined when he was a little boy, and no matter how hard he tried he could not fit Addison into the space where the wife was.
Addison argued with him nearly every time they were together now, which he tried to avoid by visiting his land out in the woods instead of going home. Inside the little aluminum trailer he had plans, rolled tight, held with rubber bands, for the house he had been planning when Addison came to Seattle. When she had first come with her apologies and low whispered words in his ear he had showed them to her, told her of the life they could have. Now he unrolled the papers in private, looking at them in silence, tracing the walls with his finger. Spread across the little table folded out from the wall, Derek could still look at the lines and imagine the house as it would be, the colors of the wood beams, the green squares of nature framed in the windows. No matter the weather, when he began to think of the view he would roll up the blueprints, carefully tucking them away again, and walk to where he would one day live. He would stand, bathed in moonlight or hidden in the pitch black, dripping wet or damp or dry, and he would take in every angle, every tree and rock and each glittering, faraway light, the sound of water in the distance, and swear to himself that things would change. He knew it was wrong to leave his very pregnant wife home alone, but looking out from the edge of his property he could almost imagine the life he had come here for. In his other life he fished before dawn and ate his catch for breakfast, drank beers on the porch with his friends, and was used to the sounds of animals scratching around late at night. He was happy, calm, successful, full of wisdom for his students. He imagined being liked at work. He didn't know how he had turned into someone who wasn't.
Addison argued with him until he finally broke, until he swore for the dozenth time that he would change, that things would be different. Then she turned the world on its head. She told the truth, and suddenly he was free. No baby, no wife, no lingering connections to his old life that had grown so near over the years.
He found himself at that same bar from the first night, considering what to do next, what kind of man he was, whether he was up for the task of being the man he wished for. Then she sat down, and her friend left, and he spoke the first civil words to her he had managed in five years.
Meredith had gone home with him and showed him that he belonged there, out in the woods. She showed him how to forget the years he wasted, the broken heart that he tried to hide. He lost himself, and he began to believe that fresh starts were possible, even standing still.
Then he saw Addison, face twisted with pain, the life inside her struggling to get out, and he didn't know who he was anymore.