PREVIOUSLY ON "FALLING APART, BARELY BREATHING":
Addison holds the no-longer-fake-pregnant-because-he-has-a-teratoma-patient, named John as he cries. And she starts crying, too, when he tells her finally, to "go chase after that lollipop girl, until the very end of the earth. Tell her your secrets, let her ask you her questions. And then let her love you, let her catch you. And let yourself fall. Let yourself fall in her arms. And let yourselves fall in love" he says.
And Addison watches as the clearness comes over his expression, and feels as her own foggy green eyes have finally cleared up a little more than they have been in a long time...
END OF FLASHBACK SEQUENCE.
Falling Apart, Barely Breathing
In Which Addison meets Meredith in a bar. Things spiral from there. This is the story about what might have happened after Meredith asks Derek to "Pick Me, Choose Me, Love Me" but before he decides to do anything about it, and after SHE decides to do something about it. MerAdd. Meddison. Set during "Bring the Pain" GA. An Addison Montgomery/Meredith Grey - Grey's Anatomy Fanfiction. Written by me, bobbiejelly
Chapter 22: Break On Through Part Twelve
**** This section occurs in chronological parallel with the previous chapter, in the same timeframe where Addison was talking with the patient, Alex & George were having fun, and the patient has had his operation.****
Ergo, I could say, "Meanwhile in O.R TWO..."
"So who knew, Addison Montgomery is a lesbian!" Meredith tries to sound subtle and not at all chipper at this (for her, at least) very exciting news.
Cristina smirks a bit at Meredith who tries to look away first but Cristina catches her eye and Meredith blushes.
'And what a cool way to come out, too, in an O.R no less!" Izzie says all romantically.
"Well, if you put it THAT way, I guess" Meredith laughs a bit nervously.
"Well do you want to go around and share all our 'coming out stories' Cristina says with a shrug as she stands at the side of the patient.
"Yeah!" Izzie says excitedly, mostly because she really wants to hear Cristina's.
"As long as your storytime does not interfere with my teaching time, I suppose I can allow it" Bailey pipes in with a hum.
She's trying to be extra supportive of this because she knows that the other attendings (except probably Addison) would be very encouraging and accepting towards them all.
"Well, I guess I'll go first then" Izzie answers her very own question.
"So I grew up in a trailer park. But you knew that that's not new. But what you might not have known is that the trailer parks always threw the most WILD of parties. And I liked to go to the parties in high school…" Izzie begins.
"And there were always these girls making out with these girls. And like I said before I always pictured myself with the princesses when I grew up. And these girls they both looked like princesses." she adds.
"And anyway, one night my friends and I were at this one party playing the game spin-the-bottle. And there was a chance for me to join in the game. So I played spin-the-bottle and then I got a girl. And that was the first time that I kissed one" Izzie keeps going.
"Did you share that story with Addison? You two have a whole lot in common with your coming out experiences" Cristina smirks up at her and side-glancing at Meredith, just so she could see Meredith give her a frown.
"We haven't talked about that together, no. But maybe later. But anyhow, after she kissed me I asked her to do it again. And then we played 7 minutes in heaven, and then we were together then, too" Izzie says.
"So you're coming out of the closet, occurred while exiting a physical CLOSET!" Meredith now exclaims to her.
"Isn't that SO ROMANTIC" Izzie swoons and Cristina swoons at that too and she says that it is.
"So how did you come out to your family then?" This time it's Preston Burke trying to be nice and supportive as he sees Bailey's and Richard's piercing eyes on him.
"When I brought that girl home for dinner with my mom, I never said it was a girl because where we lived it always happened. So she just cooked her dinner like any other date. She told me later after we broke up when she moved out of Chehalis that she wished we'd still be seeing each other so that I wouldn't have gotten all pregnant" Izzie says to her.
"You were pregnant?" Meredith asks her gently.
"Yeah, I got pregnant in high school and gave the baby up for adoption," Izzie says.
"That's really brave," Cristina says very supportively.
"Thanks," says Izzie.
"But I want to hear more of YOUR stories" Izzie exclaims.
"Alright here goes. So I had a bit of a thing with my college professor-"
"YOU DATED A WOMAN COLLEGE PROFESSOR!" Derek exclaims at her incredulously.
"No, Derek, I didn't. I was starting to tell the damn story," Cristina says to him after she's interrupted.
"So after I broke it off with him because he wanted it to be serious, I started sleeping around more. And I was attracted to talent and not genitalia, so I would spy on the smartest person in the whole class. And I would ask them out, boy or girl" Cristina offers.
"And sometimes they'd say yes, sometimes they'd say no. Sometimes I was a bit drunk, but other times I wasn't" Cristina says all the same.
And it wasn't a big deal for me or any of my friends. But it was sort of a big deal to tell my mom. Because we come from a traditional family and she never grew up to be cool about it. It took her a while to accept it; to accept me. But she came around when my college girlfriend cleaned our whole house. She said she was good for me" Cristina says.
"It didn't work out with her for similar reasons to Izzie. She moved to Colorado to become a singer or a rock-climber. Not really sure which she was really good at both along with all of her academics" Cristina laughs.
"Wow so you really liked climbing up with walls with her, I bet" Izzie jokes lightly.
And to that Cristina leans over to whisper to Izzie, 'not as much as I'd like it with YOU' before moving away again.
"I really like that story. I'm glad I got to hear it" Meredith says to her.
"Thanks, Meredith," Cristina says.
"How about you, then," asks Izzie.
"Yeah, go on, Mer" smiles Cristina.
"Well, for starters, the first time I kissed a girl was at a national science fair conference somewhere. We were the co-winners and she was the cutest thing ever I thought, that I knew- well that I knew back then anyways-"
Meredith cuts herself off before telling more of the story.
(Truth be told, now that she thinks about it, she looks sorta like ADDISON... Meredith Thinks…)
(Maybe you have like a TYPE, Meredith thinks to herself. Like tall leggy redheads… Meredith blushes more now. )
(Yeah but this girl wasn't NEARLY so tall and leggy as ADDISON is, and she's not as COOL!)
"So you were telling us about this winner of the science fair…?" Cristina eggs her on to pull her out of a thought spiral and save her from further embarrassment.
"Right, the science fair! Anyhow she was- Good looking- And she asked me out and so I said yes-"
(Meredith takes a pause because she almost DESCRIBED this woman who looked shockingly like Addison and she DIDN'T need her friends much less anyone else there to see the parallels as clearly as she did right then.)
"And we went out for a drive to one of those old-fashioned drive-in movie theaters that she knew first hand because she lived there nearby. And the movie was 'dazed and confused…"
"And in that movie, there are two girls who were kissing. And then we thought we'd try it so we started kissing. And then we kept kissing. And then we stopped watching the movie and started to-"
Meredith was going to keep going, forgetting herself at the moment as she relives parts of that fantasy.
(Running her hands through red hair, kissing soft candy lips, having those soft candy lips run up on Meredith's neck, leaving hickeys that boys all made fun of her for weeks for…)
(Meredith wonders if Addison's lips taste that sweet. She never asked Cristina that because she thought it might be a bit weird. And she wonders if Addison would kiss her on the neck…)
(And she wonders if Addison would leave marks on her neck. Would she bite her there? God, Meredith can hardly contain a loud moan at the thought. Would Addison bruise if SHE kissed her... )
(Addison's skin looks so soft to Meredith. She thinks it would feel like silk if she ran her fingers over it. She thinks it would bruise easily but she imagines kissing Addison on the neck anyhow…)
(She imagines marking all over Addison's neck and shoulders. To show everybody she's HERS and no one else's, not Derek's or otherwise. She imagines Addison kissing her neck all again…)
"And then I think that's enough of THAT part of the story for me at least" Richard Webber breaks into Meredith's fantasies with a rough of his voice.
"Meredith, I know you don't want me to treat you any differently, but I can't help it if sometimes I feel like another family member to you. And as you uncle and father figure it makes me feel, rather ill, to hear about you in such… compromising positions…" he says.
"But I AM proud of you, for being yourself," Richard says in his best dad-voice ever.
Thank-you" Meredith says with a gesture. He's taking it all in much better than Thatcher Grey did.
"So how did you come out then, to your family?" This time Richard is really eyeing her curiously.
"Well after the conference, I wanted to fly back on the weekend to see this girl over again. But my mom didn't understand why I cared so much, until I told her I like-liked her" she says.
"And I wouldn't have thought that my mother would ever understand. But she really seemed to and that's one of the best moments I ever had with my mom, Ellis Grey" Meredith says.
"When I told my dad that, he just drank a lot of scotch" Meredith sort of winces at that one.
"And as for you, well I guess my coming out to uncle Richard moment just happened like, LIVE" Meredith grins as Richard gives her a nod of approval.
"I'm sorry I never told you earlier, Richard. It just never came up," she says.
"That's okay, darling. I understand" Richard says to her back.
"Have you called your mother recently?" he asks her then.
"Not that recently" Meredith smiles. "Well tell her I said hello" Richard smiles at her.
Well those are some fine stories if I do say so myself" Bailey says to them supportively.
"Anyone else wants to share and tell?" Bailey looks around, asking inclusively.
Derek looks hard at the ground, not saying a single word.
His expression of darkness is darker, and Meredith notices the shift in him but doesn't quite put the meaning together with it.
"Well, I will say that I have been with men in my lifetime" Preston Burke finally admits to them.
"My mama Burke was very not proud. She was very homophobic and quite hard to please" Burke continues.
"So I thought it was okay to call people homophobic slurs growing up" he adds. "But I'm really glad that those days are behind me," Burke says with a sigh.
They nod at him, all of him. But Baley is still eyeing him with a mild huff because of the way he'd been behaving towards Addison, earlier.
"Have you been with a man, Richard, Derek?" Burke asks the others innocently.
And Richard says no without much of a tone of surprise, and just says that he does find men attractive, but has never met one particularly he was interested in while he was single anyhow"
And when he asks Derek, he mumbles out a harsh "NO."
And then he looks at the floor again and no one wants to ask him any more than that.
"Well I've only been with one woman in my lifetime, I take relationships very seriously" Bailey says, surprising nearly everything.
"It was before I ever met my husband, and she was also very beautiful. My girl version of Idris Elba" she sighs.
"And my mamma and my dad didn't approve of that neither.
They were upset about it for a long, long, time before they thought that something might change. But it ain't like that. It don't never changes. But I never was with a woman long term so they never really needed to fully accept it" Bailey says.
"I'm sorry," Meredith says softly and gently.
(If Addison were here, she might remark that Meredith was always the first one to say she's sorry, even if she never caused any pain in the first place. And that it always seemed to help.)
"Well, thank-you, Grey," Bailey says with a smile. "I'm glad that your folks came around for you all, at least mostly," she says.
"Well, I might have an idea why your mother was so accepting of it" Richard speaks up.
Meredith snaps her eyes up to her transplanted parent in a bit of a shock.
"Well, before she met me at least before I really knew her she had a best friend you know. They were as close as you and Cristina" he gestures between Meredith and them.
"And she was your mother's person. Her name was Marie Cerone" Richard says softly.
"MY AUNTIE MARIE!" Meredith exclaims, thinking she hasn't seen this aunt in quite a while.
"Your auntie Marie" he confirms. "Those two were close, very intimately. Your mother was a lot like Cristina, in a good way" Richard says with a smile and Cristina BEAMS at the compliment.
"And Marie-Cerone was a whole lot like Izzie, now that I think about it" Richard says in afterthought.
And I never really talked about it with her, after we- after we weren't all that close anymore…
(Richard trails off a bit now, not wanting to get into his whole adulterous love affair with Meredith's Mother right now because he hadn't really thought about how, yet.)
"And I saw those two kissing one time. Marie-Cerone and your mother. And it wasn't in a just friends sort of way. It was an "I really think they're in love with each other, way" he says.
And there is a moment where Cristina and Izzie piece together the parallels between them and Richard's story and the smile at each other with their eyes before looking away.
"And they never got to be together, because your mother broke her heart. She was too afraid of what people would think, what it would mean for her career." Richard trails off.
Back then, being women with women was not accepted as much as it is now" he says.
"And your mother wanted to be extraordinary. So she went down a road with Marie-Cerone. And she was the one to walk away from that part of their relationship" he says this.
(Richard doesn't say WHY he knows this. Why he knew that Ellis had been heartbroken and that no matter what Ellis said to him, that he always felt second-best compared to Marie-Cerone in Ellis' life, and that he didn't want to imagine what Thatcher might feel like, coming in only a third…)
"When Marie-Cerone had one of the most painful experiences of her life at work-"
(Richard doesn't go into detail about this part because it is too painful to tell.)
"Your mother did help her heal. She was there the whole way. But she never let Marie-Cerone have all of her. She never let herself love Marie-Cerone back the way she wanted to. She never let her touch her, never let the relationship progress to be more" Richard recounts.
"And so they were just that for a long time. They were much more than friends but much less than anything else" Richard says.
"And that was enough for her. It was enough for her for YEARS, for the both of them" Richard says.
"But careers got in the way, jealousy got in the way, research, grants, Harper-Avery awards…"
"Anyways, your mother had some great love in her lifetime, at least I think so-"
(Richard covers this one up as quickly as he can but no one seems to notice)
"But none of them compared to that one. She was her ONE, I think, she was" Richard says.
"She still talks to her sometimes, but not as much as Marie-Cerone always wants to" this time it's Meredith who adds on more details to the story.
"They always seemed close. My mother always lit up when she called" Meredith says.
"They would talk there for hours, she would have her own world with her" Meredith adds.
"Yes, I think they did" Richard confirms, noticing how succinctly that Meredith had put this.
"That's so sad that they never got to be together" Izzie sighs.
"It really is, I mean I'm all for career and awards and I don't know. I don't know yet what I would choose. I like to think I'm growing into a better person… more human…" Cristina says.
Izzie has the instinct to reach out to hold Cristina's hand but she can't, she smiles instead.
(Meredith considers this story for quite a long time before coming up with a response.)
"If I knew the love of my life was waiting for me, I understand why it might be a comfort, at least for a while, to be like you said; to be more than just friends, but less than anything else; to be in love with them, and so close, and yet at a distance," Meredith Grey thinks.
(She's thinking of Addison now. She vaguely sees her thoughts glance occasionally to her mystery lover. But she's half-but-convinced that this mystery person just is never going to exist to her and to tell her all their secrets. So she resigns herself to thinking of Addison more.)
(She thinks of if she and Addison ever became close like that if they were just friends, and a bit more, but less than anything else. How would she feel? How would she know? Would it be the right thing for them? Maybe it would NOW because Addison is in a DIVORCE…)
(But in a way it all just seems so damn LONELY. How could you wait there, not knowing if you could ever have them more than that, to go more than halfway, to go more than all the way in with them head-over-heels… Addison has pretty heels. She looks even leggier in her shoes..)
"But I don't know if I could live like that, live like that, forever?" Meredith questions.
"I don't know if that's a good thing for me or for them, to keep them so close but yet so far away," she says breathlessly.
"If someone was going through something where they needed a friend more than they needed a lover, then I can understand wanting to be the person they need you to be at the time," she explains.
"If what the love of my life needed a friend then I guess maybe I understand I would want to be that to them. But I still would, I would still WANT them. I would still crave them. And being around them it would make me so dizzy sometimes, at least that's how I think I would-could-ah-"
Meredith lets her voice trail off completely now, as she lets it all sink in what she's saying.
(About WHOM she's saying these things, she thinks to herself. About her mystery lover still, but mostly not. Mostly, she's thinking about ADDISON...)
(Could she be just Addison's friend if Addison doesn't or didn't like her back that way?)
(Could she even stand it? Being that emotionally intimate with her and then not being able to touch them in more than a friendly way? Not being able to kiss her like she wanted to-)
(IF SHE WANTED TO WHOA. All of these thoughts are so powerful and all over the place…)
(Would my love be enough to be enough for me if she only lets me have her like that, rather than nothing at all? Would I stay or go? Would I walk away? Would I leave her?)
(As more than a friend, but less than anything else… If it were Addison, would I ever walk away? Or would I stay? If I were only ever going to be second-best to her)
(How long would I stay by her side and then never let go?)
Meredith ponders this question over every which way in her mind, for a very very long time.
And by the time she's done thinking about this question, and questions like this, she's all dazed and confused now herself. So she takes a deep sigh. And when they're out of the O.R, Richard Webber puts his hand on her shoulder.
"You, be good for your mother," he says like he's trying to say more but he doesn't know what else he can offer.
" Maybe I'll see if my mom wants to call Marie-Cerone when I talk with her," Meredith says to him.
"I think that your mother would like that very much," Richard says with a sad smile.
(Because what Meredith doesn't know then, is that at the time Richard had been willing to give up Ellis if it meant she could be with her one- her Marie-Cerone. But Ellis said no thank-you. And he tried to understand, and she cried, he held her. And he felt selfish, to hold her like that. To hold her still, even after she had Thatcher, and he had Adele. But still, Ellis was heartbroken. And she loved him back, but loved him only as her second best-. But he never let go...)
***** END OF CHAPTER 22
Author's Note:
THANK-YOU folks all SO MUCH for the raving reviews of this piece. Every kudos/like/star. Everytime this story is followed or favorit-ed or bookmark-ed or subscribed to this story. Every COMMENT - I live for your comments and waking up to them every day is my favorite. I'd LOVE some feedback on this work as we know it. It's not the end of the world though, even if you can't, I understand. :D
But I'd still love to know your feelings, your favorite moments, your funny quotes, the things you are surprised at. And also the things that you might wonder about, or be frustrated or feel another emotion by reading this one. It's a SLOOOOOOOW burn, I know. But we ARE getting there.
So what do you think will happen next? Let me know in the reviews, I ALWAYS write back to each and every one if I can (I can't on fanfiction if you are a guest…). And I love the long and daily discussions picking the chapter apart. Fans have given me lots of plot ideas and have helped to plug some MAJOR plot holes (like JOE outing Addison). So if you find mistakes tell me and help I'll REALLY appreciate it.
Enjoy the next approximately 36-48 hours before the next installment. I do update almost daily now, like clockwork. But if I have enough written and I get enough reviews I MAY POST EARLY!
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