A/N: Thanks, for everything, to amazing beta DeniseSB, who also created the term 'McPervert'.
Chapter 21, Five Weeks Later – Thursday Evening, Part 2
When Addison left Meredith, she made her exit from Seattle Grace as quickly as possible. Out in the drizzly parking lot, she reached Mark's car and fumbled in her purse for the key. She felt immense relief when the car gave off the expensive chirping and flashing of lights that indicated it was unlocked. Because all the way there she had wanted to break down sobbing and this reassuring signal meant that she was nearly safe enough to let herself go. Once inside, the central locking system carefully activated to keep out the world, she gave in to this urge.
For five minutes she cried loudly, unrestrainedly, and desperately. She cried for the mess that her relationships had become. She cried for her lack of recognition of how much love had been available to her. She cried for Mark; for his vulnerability and pain and his loss, that she hoped was temporary, of what had always seemed unending vitality. And she cried for her utterly dead marriage and the over-wrought acquaintanceship that had survived it. Because the next stage of this torturous odyssey to bring closure to her past -- which was what her trip to Seattle seemed to have become -- was a discussion with her ex-husband.
"Pull yourself together, Addison," she thought. "Just do this and then you can go back to LA and leave it all behind." She inhaled briskly through her nose, wiped her eyes, checked herself in the vanity mirror and made a few little adjustments. Then she turned on the ignition of the silver Porsche and headed towards the bar where she had arranged to meet Derek.
Derek's bar turned out to be an unassuming, but comfortable little place. When she walked in twenty or so minutes late, there were no more than ten customers there, including Derek who sat at the bar nursing a scotch.
"Hello," she said tentatively, hovering next to him.
She startled him and roused him from introspection. "Addison!" he said. "I had been wondering if you were going to make it."
She sat down on the bar stool next to him. "I had something to do," she said. "It took a little longer than I thought it would."
He nodded, uncurious and accepting. When she first met him, she had thought this one of his good qualities, that he accepted explanations without the need for clarification. By the end of their marriage, she interpreted it as lack of interest. Now, she didn't care one way or another, except that she was pleased she didn't have to explain where she had been.
"Can I buy you a drink?" Derek asked. "I don't think I'd recommend their champagne. I think I once overhead someone saying their California Pinot Noir was acceptable."
She narrowed her eyes at him, trying to work out whether he was mocking her. "Beer, thank you." she said, wanting to defy his definition of her, even though it was pretty much accurate. "Any kind. I don't care."
Derek raised his eyebrows at this, but decided to take her at her word and called the barman over. "A Budweiser, please . . . make it two," he said, "and one glass." He smirked slightly at her as he said this.
"Thank you," she said stiffly as the barman handed the drink to her. She ignored the glass and ostentatiously drank from the bottle.
"Did you get a cab here?" Derek asked, making small talk.
"I took Mark's car," she said.
He raised his eyebrows and laughed. "Don't you hate that car?" he asked. "I seem to remember you complaining about it. The suspension in those thingsis a little rough, I guess." He smirked again. "Maybe that's part of their charm, though. If you like that kind of thing," he added snarkily.
Oh, you're so not talking about the car, McPervert! she thought. "It's fine," she snapped. "It grows on you." It didn't, she still hated it, but she wasn't going to say that to Derek. "Anyway the Carrera's suspension," Is that what makes the damn thing so uncomfortable? she thought. "can hardly be worse than that exhibit from the Land Rover museum you drive around in." She was tempted to indulge in an innuendo contest with him, but after today's events, it felt somehow wrong. In any case, she wasn't sure she could match his smutty inventiveness. After making her innuendo-free retort about the car, she took a mouthful of beer.
Derek shrugged complacently. He was perfectly happy with his choice of vehicle and delighted with his joke. "I've always thought it was typically vain of Mark to have that thing shipped from New York to Seattle," he said casually.
She sighed; sometimes his shortsightedness was just unbelievable. "You don't think there might have been another reason? That he wanted to have something here that belonged to him, for example?" she asked.
Derek snorted derisively. She ignored him. She didn't have the time to engage in a battle of petty retorts. There were more important issues to deal with here.
"Don't you care about him?" she asked disbelievingly. "You know that he still thinks of you as his friend, don't you? Even though you make his life so much harder than it needs to be . . . than it already is?"
Derek interrupted her with a weary sigh. "Addison . . . seriously?" he asked. "I make his life harder? Ha! That's a really good one." He took a swig of beer and then drank down what remained of his scotch as a chaser.
Oh, what is wrong with you? she wondered. If that's a non-starter, we'll just have to embrace the shameful and tactless! She took a deep breath and steeled herself. "When Mark and I slept together . . . 'that night' . . ."
He raised his eyebrows again, incredulous and angry, and took advantage of her hesitation. "You really want to discuss that?" he asked.
She chewed briefly at her lip. "I just wondered whether . . . ," she groped for the right words, "it may have been more shocking, in a sense, that he slept with me than that I slept with him . . . " Why, once more, did the ability to express herself like an intelligent adult fail her? "Because, we had been drifting apart," she continued, determined to be non-contentious "for some time. But you and Mark were fine, right up to the moment when he . . ."
"Fucked my wife?" Derek supplied coldly.
Addison ignored him and breathed in. "You were such good friends," she said. "I know he hurt you, but . . . don't you miss him?"
"I seem to remember having a conversation like this quite recently," Derek said deceptively calmly. "Ah, yes . . . that would have been with Meredith, before he fucked her as well." He had adopted the ice-laden tone that, ever since she had become one of its targets, utterly dismayed her.
She swallowed. "He didn't," she said quietly. "He said that he loves her, though."
He laughed wryly and said, "So, you and Mark destroyed our marriage. Then you destroyed my relationship with Meredith. And now you're attempting to dignify his seducing Meredith away from me?" He shook his head in disbelief.
"Why don't you just blame me," she asked softly. "At least two of those things wouldn't have happened if I hadn't been there."
He laughed again. "You're incredible," he said, his voice becoming more intense. "I do blame you. But that doesn't change the fact that he is entirely untrustworthy. It's impossible to have a friendship with him because he will always be led by his . . . pathological compulsion to take whatever might make him feel better at any given moment." He sighed and took a long drink of his beer before getting the attention of the barman and ordering another scotch. He didn't ask her if she wanted anything else.
"You know what he said to me?" he continued. "He said that what he had done in New York with you didn't define him. Whereas . . . well, you said it, we were best friends . . . we were brothers . . . and I know him all too well. It totally defines him. It's just one example of a lifetime of fucking over other people because he can't live with himself. He should never have stopped seeing the goddamn shrink." He stopped and sighed.
"What's wrong?" she asked.
"Nothing," he snapped. He wanted his universe to make sense. He wanted somebody to blame for the fact that, even though he strove to do the right thing, nothing seemed to work out for him. But, however much he tried to deny it, he wasn't entirely sure that his assessment of Mark was correct any more. Uncertainty had crept in. Mark had said things outside the OR the last time they spoke that, in retrospect, challenged him. Maybe they were all –- Mark, Addison and himself –- too much defined by the past. Maybe it was time they broke free and moved on.
He sighed deeply, and Addison, who had been anxiously scratching the label off her beer bottle with a manicured nail, looked up at him expectantly.
"What?" she asked, wanting him to share his thoughts.
The barman refreshed his scotch and he took a sip before saying, "Sometimes Mark . . . surprises me, I guess . . . in a good way, you know?" He looked at her as though seeking some kind of confirmation. "Do you think I underestimate him?" he asked. "That's something else he said."
"Well" she said, as much to herself as to him, "it's very easy to see him as just a shallow manwhore." She twitched an eyebrow slightly. "And it's not as though he does much to dispel that image a lot of the time. But, you're right. He can be very . . . surprising."
She waited a few moments before reorienting the conversation slightly. "Was your relationship with Meredith going well?" she asked not a little disingenuously.
Derek sighed and shook his head. "I wanted it to be," he said. "I wanted to love her. I did love her. But, she's so . . . uncommunicative, and so difficult to understand or please. I just hoped we could work it out. She and I had something so special when we first met."
Because, of course, I really needed to hear that again, Addison thought.
"I wanted to start over, to get that back, and I was trying to. It was only because of her that I tried to patch things up with Mark. I wanted to please her." But God knows if this was true. Because, for the few weeks he had been friends with Mark again, it hadn't felt like anything other than . . . friendship.
"Really?" Addison said, a little dismayed. "So . . . you hated every moment that you spent with him?"
"Well, no," he countered, his ambivalence causing him to be irritable. "I was . . . I'm used to him, I suppose, so it was comfortable in some ways." He sighed, exasperated.
"You stayed with him and read neurosurgery journals because you're used to him?" she asked incredulously.
"He told you about that?" Derek asked.
"He loved it," she said simply.
He nodded briefly, inhaled and sipped at his scotch contemplatively.
"What's the matter?" she risked teasing him. "Did your high horse die?"
He raised his eyebrows and smiled. "Have you been working on that a long time?" he asked.
"Why do you and Mark think I have no spontaneous wit?" she asked, piqued. She had, in fact, been working on 'high horse' remarks ever since Mark had first applied the term to her. She had always thought it fit Derek better.
"Because we know you," he replied without thinking what he was saying and, when he realized, sighed again. He felt betrayed by emotional reflexes that didn't match his grudges. "Is he okay?" he asked.
"I guess," she said. "The therapy's brutal, as you know. But his doctor says he's doing well."
"It's nice that you came to see him," he said.
"It would be nicer if you made up with him . . . properly," she said. She allowed a few seconds to elapse before she spoke again. "You know he wouldn't have anything to do with Meredith because of you?" she said, omitting the part that had to do with her. "Whatever you think of him, he's been hurting himself and her because he doesn't want to hurt you and because he doesn't want to . . . 'be that guy again, Add.'" She had made a passable impression of Mark that made Derek laugh slightly.
"He thinks she's 'perfect,' Derek," she said, sensing an opening. "He changes when he talks about her. I know it's a lot to expect of you but, as things weren't working out for you and her, couldn't you let it go and move on?"
He sighed. "That's all sounds very charming," he said sarcastically, unwilling to be moved quite yet. "But doesn't it strike you as odd that the only two women he's 'fallen in love with', were both involved with me? Don't you think that's just a little pathological?" the over-used word just seemed to fit, "and not a little competitive and vicious?"
"Actually, I've thought about that," she said, "and I reached the conclusion that it's partly because he got to know us and became our friend. With most other women it all goes so fast and it's so superficial that there's no chance of his feeling anything."
He shrugged, reluctantly conceding this point. "That doesn't explain why you both responded," he said quietly, his mood shifting.
Now you have to show that you felt something for me? she thought sadly. Because, even if the sentiment had to be split with Meredith, it revealed something that tore at her heart just a little.
She gave a little shrug, desperately wanting to deflect the question. "Oh, that's obvious, Derek!" she said lightly. "He's incredibly attractive when he's not doing all that awful, blatant flirting."
He raised his eyebrows incredulously. "You can't say that to me!" he said, half outraged and half on the point of laughing.
"Why not?" she asked with mock defiance. "You divorced me, remember?"
"I did," he conceded softly. "At your instigation."
She looked down, played with her replacement ring and decided to accept that the evening was going to include the slight re-breaking of her heart. "I was just trying to get your attention," she said. "That's all I was ever doing, Derek."
Before he responded, he assessed her, and was surprised by his urge to treat her gently. Finally he said, "It's not dead yet, but it may be a little lame."
"What?" she asked, confused.
"The high horse," he said, and the near softness in his voice when he offered this compromise bewildered her.
"You know Derek," she said. "I loved you."
His eyes softened. If they were expressing themselves in the past tense, he could momentarily suspend disbelief. "I loved you too, Addie," he said.
She chose, with great effort and bravado, to regard this exchange as the closure she sought. After taking a deep breath, she changed the subject to something that, ironically, was now much more comfortable.
"Since I arrived, I may have interfered a little between Mark and Meredith," she said. "I may have encouraged them to . . . you know . . . go for it." She smiled placatingly.
Derek nodded. "So, I should just blame you?" he said dryly.
"Exactly," she said. "Because I'll be in LA and not a part of your life." She smiled. "I am Satan, after all. I should be blamed."
"I'll work on it, Addie," he said. "I'm not there yet, but I'll work on it. Okay?"
"Okay," she said and took a sip of her beer.