A/N: Sorry this story fell off the radar for a while. It's been giving me some trouble and I'm trying to power through anyway. I'm not that happy with this chapter, but i want to move forward with the story and the journey of a thousand painful Addek reconciliations begins with a single chapter, or however that expression goes...

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when you know it
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No one moves. The clock on the wall audibly jerks forward through the seconds and I wonder how the hell this story is going to be remembered. And whether I'll make it long enough to find out.

Karev and Derek are both exuding that particularly toxic testosterone that makes me feel like I'm watching the nature channel ... and not in a good way. Karev may be standing between us, but it's time for me to intervene.

"All right, you can put away the measuring tape, boys," I say as breezily as I can under the circumstances. "Karev, let's go to our patient. Grey …"

"I'm in," she says quickly.

I hope she can't see my expression behind Karev's bulk. She doesn't need to know that I'm a little impressed.

"Meredith." Derek sounds wounded, which I'm admittedly enjoying.

"Dr. Shepherd," she says, "Dr. Montgomery is the only one at the hospital who goes this late. I want to learn."

"Good girl," I respond, mainly because I think it will annoy her and I don't want her liking me. That will only complicate things. "You should always choose to learn. Interns should always be learning. More learning, less…" my eyes fall on Derek again. "Dating," I finish euphemistically and Grey has the good sense to look a little embarrassed.

Derek isn't giving up (for once). "Addison, don't do this."

Does he really not get that there's no surer way to get me to do something than to use those four words? It's like he never knew me at all.

He switches tactics. "Meredith," he implores.

But she just shakes her head, she's already stepped away from Derek and towards me. Advantage Addison. I'll enjoy it now and wait until later to remember that Derek usually ends up winning the set anyway.

Not the match. No one ever won our matches. What's the word for that?

Not draw.

Divorce … that's the one.

Derek looks from one of us to the other, and then he turns and storms out. The door is still swinging when I shoulder my way out from behind the intern wall.

"Very impressive primate display, Karev, but you can drop it now. I'm not Whitney Houston and you are definitely not Kevin Costner."

He smirks. "What's that from, an old movie or something?"

I shake my head. Karev likes to jump right from hero back to villain; he's like a miniature Mark. And if I told him that, he'd probably say I'm not a miniature anything, trust me. Just like Papa Bear would. Maybe those two should just date each other; it would save me a lot of alcohol money, anyway.

"I'm sorry, Karev, I almost forgot that your status as a fetus goes beyond your maturity level. Let me see if I can put this in terms you can understand. Lizzie McGuire and Gordo? That one banana in pajamas and the other one?" At Meredith's confused expression, I shrug. "I have a lot of nieces and nephews."

( … at least I used to.)

See, the one thing Derek and I didn't hash out in the lawyer's office was his family. I only want Seattle, that's what he said. She can have everything else. I've had de facto custody of his family for years. When my niece Molly was five, she saw an old picture of Derek and his older sisters playing in the backyard with their father and asked where's Aunt Addie? When Nancy tried to explain that I'd joined the family later after I met Uncle Derek, Molly just wasn't having it. Who could blame her? I was the first person she saw, under a white mask, when I delivered her red faced and screaming into the world; I was the one who remembered that she was allergic to pistachios but simply didn't care for peanuts, liked strawberry milk in her cheerios, and was staunchly in favor of the classic Grover over that upstart Elmo. And Derek? The kids loved him, don't get me wrong. Derek only has to walk into a room and people love him; I could say it's unfair, baseless, ridiculous, except I'm a people too because all it took was one look over that cadaver and I was hooked.

Where was I? My nieces and nephews. Right. We have nine nieces. We have five nephews. We are no longer we and I have zero nieces, and zero nephews.

Numerically speaking … I have no one.

Don't feel too sorry for me, though. Not yet. You still don't know what's coming.

Karev looks at me like I'm losing it and he might not be wrong – maybe he's regretting standing up for me, or maybe, and more likely, he wasn't standing up for me at all, just standing against Derek and I happened to be on the other side. I also happen to know just how satisfying it can be to take a position against my husband.

Ex. Ex-husband. Damn it, I need shock therapy or something. It's hard enough looking for my mail under M instead of S and introducing myself with the name I thought I'd shrugged off along with the braces and the headgear.

I don't want the brownstone, or the Hamptons house. Why would I? Liquidated, they'll just be more cash I'll never spend. I would have taken his name, though. Kept it, I mean – I already took it. And it would be nice if I could keep my sisters-in-law, my nieces, and my nephews, but even if I seem desperate I'm not that naïve. I know my mother-in-law has probably already scissored me out of family pictures and I can just hear her, too, I knew she wasn't right for Derek, but I didn't want to interfere.

Which is a lie. She was dying to interfere. But Derek married me anyway.

He married me in spite of his mother and had it been on the table in the lawyer's office, I don't think I could have stopped myself from asking for Derek-of-eleven-years-ago. Hell, I'd take Derek-of-eight-years-ago.

Actually, the really shameful part is that I probably would have taken Derek-right-the-hell-now too. But he'd never guess that.

(God, I hope he'd never guess it. It's too humiliating.)

"Dr. Montgomery, should we-"

"Yes. Let's proceed."

This is no time for distraction. Distraction kills patients. I shoulder my way into the room like I haven't just been wallowing, nodding to both interns to follow me.

…

The thing is ... Grey is good.

It's not my main takeaway but it's one of them; I see Hannah responding to her admittedly effective bedside manner; she's too skinny and sharp-angled to be maternal and yet there's something soothing about her husky voice, competent at the same time. Karev seems annoyed she's taken his thunder and I can't blame him; you have to be competitive to be a surgeon, you can't enjoy anyone else's success or you'll slip behind.

So it's Meredith Grey's hand Hannah clings to as Nurse Taylor descends, Meredith Grey's voice encouraging her to breathe deeply once Hannah has reassured me, Nurse Taylor, Karev, Grey, and the universe at large that yes, she's sure.

We just have to ask you one more time, that's what they'll say. I know what you have to ask, I'm a fucking doctor, and I already said I was sure!

I'm not like Hannah, though. I was awake. I was wide awake, all my senses on alert, fascinated to learn that the aspirator sounds louder when your head is at the top of the table than when it's down between the patient's knees. Maybe it's because as a doctor you have running commentary in your head all the time, like you're narrating for a student. Commencing suction. Checking for retained products. When I was on the table my head was empty, though. Blank.

I didn't have any instructions. I wasn't a doctor and despite what I told Hannah this afternoon I sure as hell wasn't a mother, either.

(I wasn't hurt when Derek said I'd be a terrible mother because I disagreed, you know. I was hurt because he said it.)

I was seven weeks LMP the day I lay on that cold-papered table. I lay and waited for the woman I knew as Penny and her Park Avenue office referred to as Dr. Serrano-Cohen to come in and sweep away my latest mistake. I lay there and I wondered why in private practice – and no insurance accepted, either – they still haven't invented a way to make the paper anything but cold. They could use real fabric, they could warm it, but then they'd have to wash it and patients would have to know someone else's sweating thighs touched the same bleached sheet theirs did. For full out-of-pocket price no one wants to know that they're marinating in a stranger's filth. I'm fine, I'm good to go, I'm ready, that's what I said.

I believed it when I said it. Seven weeks is nothing. Seven weeks is seconds of suction and days of spotting and a handful of antibiotics.

I'm fine, I'm good to go, I'm ready.

Karev stands between the stirrups with me when I begin and Grey gently disengages Hannah, turns her over to Nurse Taylor who's spent decades doing this, and then both interns watch as, finally …

finally

… I take the first steps toward terminating Hannah Fowler's pregnancy.

All we'll do today is insert the laminaria, thin sticks that will soften and dilate her cervix. And then we'll keep her here overnight; it could take twelve hours or it could take twenty-four, until she's ready.

I'm fine, I'm good to go, I'm ready.

There's local anesthetic but that doesn't mean she can't feel anything. I pause when I hear a sound. "You hanging in there, Hannah?"

"I'm good," she mumbles.

You're doing great, sweetheart, that's what Nurse Taylor says to her; it's what they all say whether it's true or not.

"Is ... is it over?"

"Not yet, Hannah. Just hold on a little longer."

…

I'm surprised, when the procedure is successfully completed and we're scrubbing out, that Derek isn't waiting for us to read me the riot act.

He is standing outside the scrub room door, though, so I guess I still know him after all. He's wearing no gloves instead of one glove, but I still wonder if he's been waiting here the whole time. There's none of the crackling anger he was displaying before the procedure; he seems exhausted ... and resigned. He knows there's no going back now.

I should feel guilty. I know this.

(I should feel a lot of things I don't, though, so I'm used to it.)

Derek looks right at me but he's not alone out there, Nurse Grant from Richard's admin team is standing a few feet away. She has a file of paperwork and she nods at me like she's been waiting for me.

"Dr. Montgomery," she says before Derek can speak. "Did you just perform Hannah Fowler's termination?"

I see Derek out of the corner of my eye; his ears practically prick up. Maybe he's hoping I'll get dragged out of here in cuffs. Or maybe he's here to defend his precious intern. She didn't want to do it, Dr. Montgomery's just a bad influence on her.

I look Nurse Grant directly in the eyes.

"I performed the first part of it, yes. The second part will have to wait until tomorrow."

She nods. "Dr. Webber asked me to remind you that the Ethics Committee needs an outcomes report when the procedure is completed. But it can wait until the second part."

"Understood."

She thanks me and turns to leave. Derek is staring at me with a frankly open mouth, and so are the interns.

"You had permission," Derek says slowly, "you had permission before you started."

See, that's the thing with stories.

They're also about what you know … and when you know it.

…

Don't hate me.

Derek does, I know, and this isn't going to help much in that area, but – just give me a chance here. Yes, I got last minute notice that the procedure was approved, before we started the termination. Just a flick of a button; an email it took half a second to read. No, my career wasn't on the line. Neither was Karev's, and neither was Grey's. I might be Satan and an adulterous bitch, but I don't make a habit of ruining careers, even for interns who ruined both my marital reconciliation and any lingering affinity I might have for black lace panties. I had to throw out five pairs when I moved out of the trailer.

And no … I didn't tell Derek I had permission. I didn't tell Karev and I didn't tell Grey.

But all three of them know now.

Derek's just blinking, his mouth still silently moving like the fish he thinks catching will turn him into a mountain man instead of a surgeon. Karev and Grey are exchanging glances and I know I'll be fodder for plenty of intern locker room rage today. What else is new? They can compare notes with Stevens. I'm well accustomed to being hated; they'll have to do a lot better than that to shock me.

And then Derek finally breaks his silence. "What … the hell … is wrong with you?"

"Dr. Shepherd," I respond calmly, not really sure what to say next so it's almost a relief when he starts talking over me.

"No. Don't try to - even for you, Addison, this is…" He shakes his head. "You really are a sociopath."

I want to retort. I want to say takes one to know one, I want to say thanks so much for the compliment, honey, I want to say, yeah, a sociopath you spent sixteen years with, so what does that say about you? I want to say you're only mad because it turns out you're the one who was wrong and you hate that, you hate that more than anything.

He's losing control, I can tell. Derek hates being wrong-footed and I've messed up his narrative. Poor crazy Addison, can't hold a dead baby without going mute. It's enough to make the ex-husband who hates her worry, even. And all along, he was the one who couldn't handle it. From the moment I told him about my abortion … he couldn't handle it.

So I don't retort at all; I jerk my head to the interns who follow me like the puppies they are and we leave Derek standing in the hallway looking like the bastard child of shock and anger. In an empty exam room I turn to them: Karev looks angry, Grey pensive.

"You never had anything to worry about," I assure then, closing the door behind us.

"Oh, we had something to worry about." Karev sounds as pissed off as he looks. "We put our reputations on the line and you didn't bother to tell us we were in the clear. You played us like a couple of…"

"A couple of what … interns? That's what you are. You don't make the decisions here, Karev, how many times do I have to tell you that? Whatever happened would have fallen on me, not you."

"You can't know that for sure," Meredith says. She pauses. "Dr. Montgomery ... why didn't you just tell us?"

"I don't know, Dr. Grey, maybe I would have if we hadn't been interrupted. Which reminds me, why did you try to involve Dr. Shepherd?"

"Because he asked me to tell him if you were going ahead with the procedure. He ... thought you might do it anyway. He told me he was worried about you," Meredith says quietly, and her tone grates.

"You need to learn to keep your romantic problems out of the hospital and away from your patients, Dr. Grey."

I hear a snort of disbelief and turn to give Karev my coldest look.

"Excuse me? Did you have something to say?"

"Nothing, Dr. Pot … don't let me interrupt that professional advice you're giving Dr. Kettle."

I study him for long enough that even someone as thick as he is should get the message that I'm not impressed. "Karev … since it turns out you're a slightly less terrible doctor than I thought, I might be inclined to let your disrespect slide. Once, though. Only once."

"Don't do me any favors."

"Karev. Be careful."

"Why should I be careful, Dr. Montgomery? You weren't." He yanks open the exam room door and stalks off.

I watch him leave. "Very mature." When I turn back, Meredith is staring at me. "What?"

"Nothing." She shakes her head. "Just … nothing."

"Good. Keep it that way. "

"Wait … Dr. Montgomery. Addison."

I turn back at her use of my given name. "You had it right the first time, Grey."

"Okay. I'm sorry, I just wanted to say something, you know, Meredith-to-Addison instead of Dr. Grey-to-Dr. Montgomery."

This is how the interns talk: they have their own code, it's cutesy and young and I know we did it too, when we were in their shoes. That's part of why it's so annoying, it reminds me that I'm old.

"Fine. Talk."

She looks at me. "Derek was upset. About Hannah. But he was upset before that too, he's been ... different, for a few days now. He got into the elevator with me and he … " She pauses. "I broke up with Finn."

Finn. Poor hapless vet.

"Meredith … why are you telling me this?"

"Because after I broke up with Finn, I un-broke up with him."

"You're ... dating Finn again. I see. Does he know what happened at prom?"

She doesn't answer. I guess we're only on a partly-sharing basis. I wave my hand to indicate she should continue … quickly, because I don't know how much more of this I can take.

"Something's going on with Derek," she says quietly.

"He's terminally arrogant and he can't bear the thought of being wrong. You mean other than that?"

She actually looks like she might be smiling a little bit. "I'm worried about him."

"I thought you said he was worried about me."

"I did."

"If Derek's worried about me and you're worried about him, who's worrying about you?"

Her eyes shift, and she doesn't answer.

"Do you want my advice?"

"Do you want me to answer that?"

Now I almost smile. "Being an intern is hard enough without attaching yourself to people whose problems are a hell of a lot more complicated than you can figure out in two months."

I see her mouth open, and then close again, and I know why. It's because she wants to tell me it wasn't just two months, with Derek. In her mind, it wasn't. It was two months before Satan swept into town and then it was every month after that, up until now. Every week, every day, every hour I followed my husband of eleven years down one hospital hallway after another begging him to pay attention to me. Doesn't matter if it's Sinai or Seattle Grace; sucks to be Satan either way.

Being Satan means the husband who took you back and let you share whatever passes for a bed in his midlife-crisis-trailer lay beside you all those nights cheating on his mistress. To Meredith, Derek was hers all along. I was the interlude. I was the break in the romance of the century. And it doesn't matter if it's true or laughingly, screaming false – it's what she believes.

And at the end of the day, he chose her even if she's not choosing him back.

So, there's that. Derek can't handle learning that I lived with Mark, that I terminated Mark's baby? Fine, join the club, because I couldn't handle learning that in two months the man I spent almost seventeen years with built up a one-night bar stand into Antony and freaking Cleopatra. And I couldn't handle learning that while I stood there like an idiot in a silver tinsel-draped faux-prom almost as awkward as my first one, waiting for my handsome husband to finish checking on a patient – he's so thoughtful, so compassionate, with his patients, he'll even leave a dance with his wife to make sure his post-ops are comfortable – that same husband was pocketing Meredith Grey's tiny black panties.

And Finn took her back. He was waiting too, but he took her back. Maybe it will be like Derek and he'll put Meredith through a series of tests, make her jump through hoops and share a trailer smaller than her walk-in closet, call her names and ignore her in public and wait until she's thrown away the rest of her life before he changes his mind and leaves her.

(By leaves her, of course I mean screws someone else while on a date with her.)

That's the thing: if you're me, and you sleep with Mark while you're married to Derek, you're an adulterous bitch. I'm not denying it; it's the truth. But if you're Derek, and you sleep with Meredith while you're married to Addison, even if Addison is a hundred feet away down the hall, you're a sensitive, tortured soul who was only doing his best.

The irony is Derek is never doing his best. Derek just … is, and the world applauds. And I'm one of them, because no matter how much I hate myself, I miss him. Fuck everything … because I miss him.

"I miss him too," Meredith says quietly.

I school my face into its most severe lines. "Excuse me, Grey?" I know I didn't say it out loud, so either Grey has talents beyond whatever she did to mesmerize Derek in those two months or I'm more obvious than I thought.

Neither choice appeals.

She just looks away from me anyway. "Never mind." She adjusts her pager on her hip. "I should go … find Dr. Bailey. And then I'll check in on Hannah and report."

"Grey ... wait."

She turns back.

"Good work in there."

She nods, accepting my praise, and leaves me alone.

…

I don't even bother to look in Derek's office. We've been driving each other to drink for years and I'm well aware the bottle of Lagavulin stashed in his bottom drawer won't cut it this time.

He doesn't raise his head when I approach him at the bar; he's bellied up with both elbows resting on the sticky surface in a way I would never have let him do if we were still married. He'll smell like a brewery later and he'll have to dry-clean his coat but if that's all the damage he takes away from this I suppose he's lucky. We both hurt each other, I know that, but somehow I was always the one who got hurt.

"Derek."

He still doesn't bother to look at me.

"I'm, uh … I'm sorry I slapped you."

He shakes his head. "Of course that's what you're sorry for."

I let my chin rest in my hand. I'm tired too Joe gives me a bottle of water I didn't ask for, but it's what I want, so I take it. "I've already apologized for everything else, Derek. Repeatedly. We're divorced, I'm done with all that. Clean slate."

"Your slate is not clean."

I take a sip of water instead of answering, waiting for him to speak.

"What about turning Meredith against me?"

"You know what, Derek, I think you did that yourself."

He shakes his head again. "No. We had … we're having …. That's not the point. You turned her against me about this."

"Maybe she doesn't appreciate how you're treating me?"

"How is – how can you possibly make this about you?"

"I don't know, Derek, I'm trying to put myself in her shoes. You sleep with a married guy, you get a front row seat to how he handles the aftermath, you kind of want to think he deals with it like an adult."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"I guess it means if you call your wife a whore too many times your mistress starts wondering if she's next."

His eyes narrow. "You have experience in the area?"

"The only married guy I've ever slept with is you, actually."

"Let me get this straight. You're giving me relationship advice … and it involves my being nicer to you." He pronounces the word nicer like it's foreign to him.

(Maybe it is.)

I shrug. "Take it or leave it."

He studies me for a moment. "You were playing with fire with that patient."

"No, I was practicing medicine." I pause. "Derek … why do you care?"

"I don't."

"You cared enough to screw with my patient."

"You called me in for a consult."

"Okay, now we're just going in circles." I start playing with the stirrer for lack of anything else to do, bending it in two and then back the other way. "Look, Derek … what happened before, that was years ago."

He doesn't respond.

"And the situations were different."

"Why didn't you tell me you had approval?"

To make you squirm.

The thing is, I'm no better than he is, but even though we're divorced and he hates me I still kind of don't want him to know that.

"You were interfering," I remind him.

"So you let me think you were throwing away your medical license, what, to teach me a lesson?" He shakes his head. "You're unbelievable."

You know, he says that a lot. Maybe he should start believing me.

"Derek. You really think I'd sacrifice Karev's career? Grey's? Mine?"

"I don't know what you'd do. I've learned a lot about you … recently."

I can tell he means more than the abortion. His eyes are soft, but they're not directed towards me. Part of me wants to reach up to touch his face, the same side I marked in Richard's office, because apparently the instinct to comfort is the last thing to go.

For me, anyway. Obviously not for him.

"Look, Derek … we don't have to get along, not really. But we do have to be civil. We're professionals. Can't we do that?"

"Can't you go back to Manhattan?"

"You know I can't," I tell him patiently. "And I'm not arguing about it. It's not up to you where I go, not anymore. If you don't want to work with me, you move."

"Seattle is mine," he mutters.

"Then you should have sent me packing when I first got here instead of stringing me along for six months."

"I wasn't stringing you along," he mimics my tone in a way that makes me want to slap him again. "I was trying."

"No, you weren't."

"Yes, I was. I was trying to save the marriage you destroyed."

"No, you weren't," I say again. "You wanted people to think you were trying, but that doesn't mean you were actually trying."

"I was – forget it. Just forget it. There's no satisfying you." He drains his scotch and orders another.

"Don't you think you've had enough?"

"If I did, would I have ordered another?"

Such a Derek answer.

I look up anyway when Joe starts to slide a tumbler across the bar, to see if I can get him on my side.

He just gives me a sort-of sympathetic look. "I'll keep an eye on him, doc."

Derek doesn't seem to notice the exchange; he's staring into the glass like the tortured romantic hero of his own story and in spite of everything an embarrassing part of me is still tempted to lean over and press my lips against the exposed back of his neck, just under the spot where his longer hair curls. He'll smell like scotch and sadness and maybe he'll remember that once, a long time ago, he chose me. He chose me over everyone else and promised to keep loving me even though we were twenty-six and stupid and hadn't tasted anything of the world yet. We still promised.

I guess it was just one of the promises we broke to each other.

Derek glances over at me. "Still here?"

The question burns through me. It could mean so many things. The bar. Seattle. His life in general. I tied myself to him almost twelve years ago and I don't care how many lawyers we hired to sever AddisonAndDerek, he's still not a stranger.

I wish he could be.

But he's not.

"Yeah. I'm still here."

His eyes are cloudy. "Why?"

"I guess that's the question." I shift in my seat and before I have to think of a better answer, my pager goes off.

911 for Hannah Fowler.

Shit.

All I have time to do is thrust the rest of my bottle of water at Derek before I'm bolting for the door.

To be continued. So, this story is already different from what I expected, but I'm continuing it anyway, and forcing myself not to go nuts on the rewrites. For those of you who thought Derek was behaving worse than Addison in the last few chapters, I feel ya. Just because he thinks he's looking out for her doesn't mean that's what's really going on, and even if the inside of Addison's head sounds like a fever dream, it doesn't mean she's actually crazy. To echo my narrator ... don't hate me. Or at least not yet, because this story has a lot more to go. Review, pretty please?