Learning to Love Again

Prologue

Julia's POV

It's funny how you can go from having everything, to eventually having nothing at all.

A lot can happen in two years. You can runaway. Go back to New York. Live on the streets for a while. You learn to sleep during the days, walk the streets at nights.

Hunts Point becomes your best friend. It's where you work at nights. It's where you by drugs. It's where you make friends. It's home.

You celebrate your fourteenth birthday, high as a racehorse. You wake up in an alley way the next day with no memory of the night before.

So you fill in the pieces, re-trace your steps, try and figure out where you where and what you did. My steps retraced back to an apartment in the Bronx. Mike's apartment. Ainslie's apartment. I learnt I had a three-year-old sister. I detoxed, became clean for her. I lived with Mike and Ainslie for the next year, eventually celebrating my fifteenth birthday.

Ainslie and Mike fought a lot. I take care of Ryleigh. I started going to school.

Then one day, I came home and there was blood, so much blood.

It's funny isn't what can happen in two years. It's funny how you can go from having everything, to eventually having nothing at all.

Derek's POV

When you are torn between two people, between two places,

you start to lose sight of who you are.

It's funny how things can crumble to the ground within seconds, minutes, even hours. It doesn't take long after that for a crisis to emerge and for things to continue to spiral downhill.

A lot can happen in two years, twelve hours, seven minutes and thirty seconds.

Your daughter can go missing.

You cheat on your wife during a "hospital prom."

You and your wife can get a divorce. She can move to LA. Start work at a private practice.

You move back into what your daughter would call, the trailer in the middle of nowhere land.

Your sister can relapse. Go to rehab for the third time. Then get a job working for Doctors Without Boarders, leave the country and move to Africa.

Eventually, you can't let go of your daughter's disappearance. You can't let go of the aftermath. You can't let it go. You can't move on.

So you stop going to work because your patients and colleagues no longer you as a God but as a father who is fixated on his missing daughter.

So you lose the girlfriend you were going to purpose to by throwing your mother's engagement ring into the woods.

So you become depressed, cold hearted and alone.

Eventually, things begin to get better. You start going to work again. You start dating again. Eventually, little by little, you do move on.

But the thing is, life is never exactly how it was before.

Addison's POV

There was no reason to stay in Seattle.

I didn't feel anything there. I didn't feel anything at all

It's been two years since I've moved here. Oceanside Wellness is different than Seattle Grace. A good different. Here, there's no rain. There's no Meredith. There's no Derek. There's no Mark.

Richard begged me to stay, he promised he'd keep my job open as long as he could.

I needed I reason to wake up every morning. To not care that it's raining

He begged. He pleaded. He said I belonged in the OR.

There was no reason to stay in Seattle. I didn't feel anything there. I didn't feel anything at all.

So I moved, here to California, took a job at Oceanside Wellness, a private practice my friends Naomi and Sam owned, or did own.

I run the practice now. Pete, Violet, Cooper, Charlotte, and Sam, they all own shares.

You'd think I had it all; a new house on the beach in Santa Monica; a new job; new friends; a new life.

But there's no Derek. There's no Mark. There's no Seattle. There's no Mini D.

Sometimes I miss the rain. I miss the rush of the OR. More than anything, anything at all, I miss my daughter.

Julia's POV

You don't realize how much can happen in two years until you experience it.

Take a breath, close your eyes, look back, recount your memories. Reminisce on what happened between now and then.

Are their moments you regret? Are their memories you wish you didn't remember? Or maybe you have one's that play over and over in your head-moments your memory won't let you forget.

It's when you reminisce these memories that you realize how much has actually occurred in two years. And the thing is, you don't realize how much can happen in two years until you experience it.