𝙇𝙓𝙄𝙄𝙄.
ADDISON AND DEREK / 𝘙𝘌𝘗𝘙𝘐𝘚𝘌

──────

IF YOU'D TOLD Addison that she would be staying in Seattle like this, two weeks ago, she would have never believed you.

Her hand was shaking very slightly as she sat straighter in the chair, bracing herself on the arms to steady herself. She clasped her hands tightly, attempting to stop her fingers from trembling-- it was a nervous tic, a movement that was not scared nor happy. 

Ever so often, her foot would wobble, the heel swinging back and forth like the pendulum in a clock. She'd swallow, readjust herself in the seat and return her attention to the folder in front of her.

On the other side of the desk, Derek stared at the same file.

 To the left of the folder sat her surgical contract, freshly signed with the ink still drying. 

Slowly, he leant over and slid it towards him. There was no conversation, just the slight sag of Addison's shoulders as she let out a breath, watching the contract disappear into a draw. She slid a little lower in her chair.

She couldn't remember the last time she'd been in the Chief of Surgery's office. It was different now. Gone were the things that made the space indicative of Richard Webber (Addison found herself staring at Derek's PhD that was hung on the wall), replaced with things that felt oddly impersonal. 

What she could remember was the hours she'd spent inside this hospital, the times she'd come into this office and laboured over her broken marriage... Addison glanced up at Derek and sighed, cradling her chin in her hand.

"Congratulations on the promotion."

She couldn't decide whether she sounded bitter or not. 

Just a few years ago she'd been sat outside that office fighting for this job. It felt so alien to think about that now, especially with her ex-husband sat opposite her. 

She supposed that, in a weird way, he suited this-- the shirt, the tie, the god complex, it went nicely with his eyes. 

He nodded, rearranging a pen on the tabletop.

Conversation had been poor. Addison didn't really know what to say; what do you say to Derek Shepherd? The last time she'd been here, talking to him like this, Derek had been poking around Archer's skull and she'd begged him so, so desperately to give her the time of day-- 

Dignity? Addison hadn't heard of it. It was a stranger to her, just like everyone else in this city.

Strangers... Strange... Strange Things.... 

Her eyes flickered back to the medical record on the desk and she cleared her throat. Now this was exceptionally strange. Getting a phone call from Derek had been very strange. 

They didn't speak; it was the unwritten rule of a divorce, Addison knew that much from her parents. She hadn't realised that they had a reason to speak, they had no shared assets anymore, no kids, no dogs or cats-- Beth.

Somehow, it was beginning to feel like Beth was their shared child. Derek had always treated her like a little sister, he'd taken to her so much easier than Addison had to any of Derek's sisters. In return, Beth had treated him like a brother too. But now, with their separation, Addison could only ask who exactly had gained custody of the youngest Montgomery sibling. 

She felt as though she was waiting to go into a principals office, about to hear all of the issues that Beth had caused at school.

The problem was that she'd never been Beth's first call when it came to things like that. 

It had always been Archer who'd been called over state-lines to boarding school (mostly because their parents were always out of the country on their separate vacations, busy not giving a damn about their kids). 

This felt wrong, this felt ominous and it felt like things were about to go very wrong.

The thought of opening that file exhausted her. Why had she agreed to this? She didn't want to do this, be here, know these things. 

But then there had been the tone of Derek's voice, the relief when he'd seen her arrive and the way that he'd agreed to let her work here without hesitation. 

She'd sat in his office and he'd had everything ready so quickly--

Addison found herself staring over his shoulder, out of the window. 

She didn't like that, if she strained, she could almost hear footsteps approaching his office with such anger and determination. She sensed that it was coming, like an oncoming storm cloud or an incoming ambulance; it was as if, from the moment Addison had opened that medical record, she'd trigger something catastrophic in the universe.

"Have a look," Derek breathed, jerking his chin down at the file in between them. 

She hesitated. Like her, he seemed to be uncomfortable, unable to stay still. She wasn't sure whether it was the phenomenon of having her here in this office or the fact that this was definitely not legal. Addison hesitated. 

"See what you find..."

If someone were to peer into this office, they would have thought nothing of this conversation: two doctors and a medical file. It was a normal situation. 

It was a normal situation in concept. But there was nothing normal about estranged divorced adults sitting in an office like this with a file like that-- it wasn't just a medical file. It was family.

"What am I looking for?" Addison frowned. 

He hadn't told her what was going on. She'd entered this office blindly and oblivious to what she'd find. It filled her with the nauseous sort of anxiety, the type that made her want to leave the room immediately. But she didn't leave, she just pressed her palm against the folder and very, very slowly slid it closer to herself.

Derek paused. It was as if he was thinking long and hard. He watched her fingers brush across the cover of the medical file. 

Absently, Addison traced the outline of her name; the E, the L, the I, the...

He shrugged. "You'll know it when you see it."

Derek was so nonchalant, filling the space where his panic had been on the phone. It unsettled her. 

She stared at the name, at the letters that were slowly embedding themselves into her brain. He watched her as she sunk into the silence, deep in thought. She was thinking about all of the times she'd said that name... thought that name...

"Did you know that Archer and I named her?"

Addison's comment made Derek tilt his chin upwards, eyebrows raising. She hadn't even realised that she'd spoken. The question was completely innocent, a thought that appeared candidly and off-handedly. 

When Addison looked up from the medical file and saw Derek's expected expression, she realised that he was waiting for her to continue.

"Beth. Our parents kind of just... just let us choose whatever we wanted. I think they, uh, kind of gave up on the third kid. Probably ran out of names that started with 'A'... Just left it up to an eight year old and an eleven year old." She paused and smiled dimly. "Elizabeth was my favourite character from this kids book. I used to obsess over it... It was about a princess and a dragon... and then the... the princess saves this prince from the evil monster and realises her prince is a tool so she decides to just ride off into the sunset on her own..." Another beat. "Beth's like that. She's the princess that tells the prince to go screw himself and rides off on her own to Canada... into the sunset."

He didn't speak.

"She hates the name Elizabeth," Addison stared a hole into the medical file. "She hates being called anything but Beth.... She hates her name and she hates Connecticut, absolutely despises our hometown. She says that suburbia makes her break out in a rash. I don't think she's been back there since our grandmother died. I think she hates our parents too... which I don't... I don't blame her for, I guess.... and she hates me. Even though I've just tried so hard..."

She cut herself short. Derek shifted in his chair.

"I think I'm the dragon," She continued, lips pulling into a frown, "I didn't want to be the dragon but I stole the prince and set the castle on fire and... now I'm telling my ex-husband my issues because I don't have anyone else left."

Very slowly, Derek moved in his chair. 

He shifted his weight from one side of his body to the other and just let Addison fester in her own thoughts. He was waiting for her to open that file. He supposed that, a long time ago, he'd stopped caring about how Addison felt about things; about anything, the weather, the news, her spiralling emotions on familial tension. 

Now he just watched as Addison gripped her sisters medical file and realised how lonely she truly was.

"I fucked up."

It was a moment of clarity and for a moment, Derek was tempted to say 'Well about time you realise that'. 

Those three words were so obvious that he almost chuckled. They felt like they needed a fanfare. But he didn't. He nodded slowly and then inclined his head down at the file. His molars locked at the thought of what was inside and he just sighed.

Addison didn't receive his cue. She was distracted. In fact, she'd been completely beside herself for the past twelve hours, deeply ingrained in what Beth had said, not only at the dinner party, but also in the elevator. 

The mess of the last few conversations she'd had had been enough for her to have very little sleep (she was relying on a cup of coffee and half a tube of concealer this morning) and to delay her flight. She couldn't exactly decide why she was staying in Seattle; it was either because she was scared that fleeing this city would just make things worse or because she wanted to stay and, just as Archer had intended, try to make things better.

"I fucked up so much," Addison pressed a hand to her chin and exhaled loudly, shaking her head. "I messed up so much that I... I don't know whether to laugh or cry. My sister hates me, my brother is just... My ex-husband is the Chief of Surgery and the guy I cheated on him with is having the time of his life..."

Again, Derek didn't respond.

"I really don't want to be a dragon," Her words were mumbled into her palm. They were said so quietly but with such conviction that Addison almost imagined flames in their place, licking at her skin and burning a hole straight through the centre of her palm. "Dragons hide in caves in LA and collect shiny treasures that look like Mark Sloan and then get their whole life upended when they're invited to dinners and dragged through the mud..."

"I think everyone is a dragon," It was Derek's version of consolidation. He leant back in his desk chair and looked over at his ex-wife with a sigh. His voice caught on the back of his throat, "I wish we lived in a fairytale. It would be much easier--"

"You got your fairytale," Addison said softly, referring to his happy marriage, the big office and the shiny sheen to his brand new dress shoes. "Beth has hers as well. She has Charlie and a job and her sobriety and a wedding and... and Mark has his hookups and his... whatever Mark does... and I have an empty condo back in Malibu."

"And you have half of all of my assets," He reminded her, crossing his arms over his chest. "You could have had the brownstone too."

"No," Addison breathed out, "I never liked the crown moulding and... it just makes think of..." She shook her head. "Fuck the brownstone."

He didn't know what to say. 

He didn't know how to respond to that. He just sat there, more pressing things on his mind than Addison's impending mental breakdown. She was clearly in need of someone to tell her that everything was okay, but Derek didn't think that things were okay at all. He tapped his fingers in a nervous twitch against the table-- things weren't okay at all: His chest still hurt and Beth was keeping secrets, the sort of secrets that would change things completely.

"Did you hear that Mark slept with the new Head of Psych candidate?" He felt the need to redivert the conversation into lighter topics. Derek cracked a (slight) half-hearted smile and watched as Addison rolled her eyes, commenting how 'Mark will be Mark.' It was as exhausted as Addison's "She's called Beth, Beth Ballard. It spooked him."

Appreciating the change of pace, Addison chuckled, "We always did say they managed to find their way back together no matter what... in weird and mysterious ways, right?"

Her joke made him roll his eyes.

"I think it's really messed with him," Derek said, "I don't know what's gotten into him but he's really been... different. Well, we're all different after... after what happened a few months ago but Mark is... Mark. He doesn't let anything get to him--"

"It's Beth," Addison said. It was two words, said matter-of-factly as if it was the answer. 

There was a brief pause and, in that pause, the ex-couple seemed to simultaneously reminisce. It was the nostalgia in the air; a dinner party had caused a storm to brew at the back of all of their minds. 

"It's what she does best..." the redhead sighed, "She gets to people, gets under their skin, with Mark more than others."

"It is Beth," Derek repeated in agreement. He kissed his teeth and very softly shrugged. "But it's Mark too. Nothing usually fazes him... I don't think he was even affected by the shooting..." Addison noticed how Derek seemed to falter at his own mention of the incident. "I think there's still a lot that's unsaid between them. It feels unfinished."

"It's a mess," Addison said suddenly, her head raising to look over at her ex-husband. There was a tension in her jaw, one that flickered on and off like a muscle that was two stressed to make it's mind up on what it wanted to do. "Y'know... when he came to Seattle, he told me that he lost his best friend and the girl that he loved." She paused. "I-I thought he meant me."

Another pause. (Derek couldn't find words to say anything.) 

Addison just let out a long laugh and smiled to herself. It was a strained sound, the sort of drained laugh that was filled with the weight of the last half-decade. In that moment, Derek wondered whether the strain in her tone was from self-disgust (directed at herself for breaking her sister's heart and their marriage) or whether it was the sound of a bruised ego (from a woman who hadn't fallen in love with a man who was incapable of loving her back.) 

Either way, Addison wouldn't look her ex-husband in the eye.

She could remember the exchange so vividly. 

Mark had appeared off of a flight from Manhattan and he'd ghosted in through the front door of the hospital as if he owned the place. He'd been all debonair and suave and had taken a fist to the face. He'd followed her to Seattle, or as she'd thought, and he'd stood there and she'd, for a moment, realised that maybe it was a good choice to love him. 

A fist to the face, the title of dirty mistress to his name... she'd wondered whether Derek would have done the same, whether her, at the time, husband would have gone through all of this to get her back—

Looking back, Addison wondered whether Mark had come to Seattle hoping to find Beth. 

Instead, he'd found her and realised that Beth was never going to take him back. 

He'd burnt his bridges, so he attempted to build a new one— he'd flirted with Meredith, flashed all those smiles and one-liners, but Addison had been able to tell that no matter how much they tried, she wasn't Beth just like he wasn't Derek.

"He didn't."

(He hadn't meant Addison at all.)

The moment those two words left them in was odd. It felt less cinematic than Addison had thought it would. There was no big revelation. Derek wasn't surprised by that and neither, in a way was Addison. 

Both of them knew Mark well enough to know that he had never been the sentimental type; he didn't do feelings and he didn't do reciprocation. Mark didn't love. 

He was the stand-offish type, a man who was physical rather than emotional. He didn't date and he didn't pine away people. But there had been an exception-- That one exception had been the way he'd looked at Beth Montgomery all those years ago in Manhattan. 

It had mystified them all, like seeing a unicorn or a double rainbow. It had confused them, it had baffled them-- and it had attracted Addison like a moth to a flame.

What a tragically handsome flawed man and what a tragedy had it been to fall in love with him.

Addison still didn't understand how it all happened. But it had. 

And she'd been stuck in Beth's shadow to clean the mess she'd been partially responsible for. In retrospect, Addison figured that Mark had never loved her, or at least not anything close to what he'd felt for her sister. He'd loved her so much and they'd been so happy until things had started going wrong-- 

How pitiful, Addison thought, was it to want that sort of love so desperately that you'd had to steal it for yourself.

She sighed, massaging her forehead. "Introducing the two of them is probably one of the worst mistakes I've ever made."

"I introduced her to Amelia," Derek let out a long breath, leaning over and picking a pen out of his pen pot. He spoke as if the idea of Beth and Amy existing in the same space was his personal nightmare. "I think I win."

He stayed sitting there, watching as the oldest Montgomery sister turned pensive, thoughtfully staring across the office and out onto the walkway outside. He wondered what she was thinking about-- did she think about Beth like he thought about Amy? 

His little sister had caused him sleepless nights before; she was Beth's equal, rebellious, stubborn and too secretive for her own good. He knew that Amy wasn't doing well, she hadn't found her fairytale, but Derek had given up hope on her long ago. His sister was waltzing around Los Angeles, notably not sober or in a good headspace. 

He'd put so much energy into helping her get clean, into making sure that she was okay and she'd completely pushed that all aside. He'd stopped answering her calls a long time ago.

Beth had stopped answering Addison's too.

"I feel like being in Seattle is a bad idea," The neonatal surgeon was still talking, still thinking, still self-reflecting. Her eyes wandered around the room, past the trophies of Derek's success in this city. "But I can't leave... not until everything's okay. I want to be in Beth's life. I don't want to be a dragon-- if this, if she's doing something bad... I just... I can't do New York again."

By this, she referred to the legal document on the table. It had been sitting between the two of them for a long time. 

Derek just wished she'd open it. 

He couldn't bring himself to say his suspicions out loud. 

He wanted her to look. 

He just wished she'd look-- he didn't know what was worse, the thought of him confirming his suspicions or calling him paranoid.

Derek, very briefly, wondered whether Beth would ever stop answering his phone calls too.

"It won't be like New York." He said it with such determination that Addison almost believed him. She chewed on her bottom lip, seriously considering breaking her new contract and heading back to LA. "I don't think anything could ever get worse than New York or even begin to touch it..."

"Don't challenge it," Addison groaned. "I thought so too... but then I got the call saying that my little sister was going to die and I completely freaked over it--" Another groan. "I'm not good at this big sister thing, am I?"

Derek didn't answer. 

In all honesty, he wasn't exactly sure whether he was the best big brother either. All he knew was that he'd ended up being the only guy in a household of women, all who were louder than the next and that he'd tried his best to be the sort of person who looked out for others-- he'd tried. He'd tried to be a father figure and he guessed that Addison had tried to mother Beth in the absence of Bizzy Forbes, who had never cared enough for her youngest child. 

He remembered how stressed she'd been over her, how much Addison had tried too. It hadn't been easy on any of them, but that definitely didn't excuse the fact that both Mark and Addison had just decided to disregard everyone.

He watched Addison sigh, pull her chair forwards and open Beth's medical file. In silence, she flipped through the pages, reaching the sheet that Derek had indented with a bookmark. She hesitated. He cleared his throat.

"I never thought I'd be snooping through her medical file," Addison sighed again. She shook her head, pushing her hair out of her eyes. "I thought it was bad when Mark intervened on her surgical internship but..." (Derek lowered his head at the mention of ManWest, it was subtle, but it was incriminating. Addison didn't notice.) "We win."

"I don't trust Beth," Derek said, even though it hurt to say it aloud. This was his sister too. "I think there's a lot she's not telling us. I know she went to Canada and I know she's spent the last five years with Calum, living with a lawyer--"

"So you think she's what?" Addison's brow furrowed as she struggled to keep up. She chewed on the inside of her "You think she's in trouble? That she needs legal help? You think she was appealing her suspension or--"

Derek wasn't a naturally optimistic person. He tried to be; after all, surgery always demanded hope. It demanded the surgeon to focus on success, to concentrate whole-heartedly on the best outcome-- a happy, healthy patient with a happy, healthy brain and happy healthy full mobility. 

Over the years, Derek had tried his best to see the good, but then things had very slowly tested his patience; professional setbacks, complications, the death of his father, the deterioration of Amelia and the moment he'd caught his wife in bed with his best friend. 

He'd watched Beth fade too, watched Meredith drown and then got shot in the chest point-blank by a man who had lost faith in the world too.

Derek tried to be a naturally optimistic person, so it almost hurt him to say it aloud:

"I think she's causing the trouble."

Addison blinked. "You think she broke the law."

"Why else would she go to her ex-fiancé?" It didn't make sense. "That man broke her heart almost worse than Mark... You remember what sort of stuff he used to do under the desk, right? He used to favours. Pay off corporations and help people get away with corporate crime and allegations-- Anything, anything you need to go away he'd do it for you. I remember Doctor Reinke at the hospital tried to pay him to sink some drug misuse allegations."

"Yeah," Addison nodded, a dent appearing between her eyebrows. "My dad used his father's law company to cover up a drunk driving accident he had back in Connecticut. It saved his medical license... Maybe Beth was trying to save hers too. Maybe she was trying to get his company to fix her record?"

"I don't think so," Derek's face was hard, lined with deep thought and indecision. Again, he looked down at the medical record. "It would have gone away. His partner is one of the legal representatives for Harper Avery... with that sort of power behind you... she'd be heading an OR board with an award or a nomination to her name."

Addison faltered.

"So what?" She almost didn't want to know. She felt like telling Derek she didn't want anything to do with this and catching a flight home... but it was Beth. Elizabeth the princess who told her to fuck off in elevator fights and galloped off into the sunset for her own happy ending. "You're saying she committed a crime... but what?"

It was a subtle movement, Derek gestured towards the medical file with his eyes. Addison's eyebrows raised as she caught on.

"Medical fraud?" She said it and immediately was baffled by it. No. That couldn't be right. "That doesn't make sense... what would she want to cover up?"

In a way, it made sense. Beth was born into a family of doctors, doctors who could all (illegally) sit here just like they were now, conversing over the freshly photocopied pages of her medical files. 

Addison was holding her complete medical history in her fingers, confidential documents that otherwise wouldn't be seen by any intimate family (she was pretty sure that just talking about going through Beth's legal documents was classed as a federal crime). It made sense. 

If there was something Beth didn't want them to know, doing something off the books or changing some details around was the way to cover it up.

She paused.

"Take a look," Derek repeated his words from earlier and watched as Addison very slowly leant forwards, resting her eyes on the dog-eared page. (He really didn't want to be right.) "You'll know for sure. I don't want to be right."

So she read. She read through all of the notes that had been typed up from Beth's assessment. How weird it was to see her sister condensed into a series of words. 

Addison had read so many files before but usually, they were for babies or pregnant women, some with colourful histories and some with none at all. 

Each file was different and often not even true representations of what the people were like in person; as she read through the information on the page, she did not feel the essence of what made Beth Beth, only a shadow of a woman who--

Wait.

A nagging little voice started at the back of her head. 

The realisation rushed through Addie slowly like a bucket of cold water. It was gradual and creeping as if it was being poured with extreme care and precision. 

It seeped deep into her skin and made her blood freeze. It was cold and gripping and made her pause completely. Her eyes froze on the final line of the report and she felt her world grind to a stop for a moment--- No. 

No, that can't be right.

She flipped further backwards in the record, searching for 2006. 

Across the table, Derek was staring at a picture he had on the corner of his desk-- it was a photograph from New York, a table at the back of Balthazar's on a Sunday morning. It was in a frame, slightly scuffed as he remembered kicking it across the brownstone on the night he'd left New York, caught in a furious rage. 

Even behind the fogged glass, he could see the outline of the three of them: Beth, Mark and Derek, all sat at a table with Addison behind the camera.

It'd been his birthday. Addison had booked the table in advance. She'd surprised him with a table and it had been one of the first times in months that any of them had been able to make it to a restaurant with their busy schedules. 

Beth and Mark sat opposite each other and they looked happy (they'd been happy with each other despite the hell that was ahead of them). Derek did too. Addison was absent from the frame. If he had to make a guess on where the picture had been taken on the timeline, he'd have said just before everything started to go to shit. 

It was the only picture from those years that he ever looked at. It reminded him that, even though the world had been upside down since Gary Clark had entered the hospital, things always managed to find their way back together eventually.

"Oh my god."

Addison's revelation, this time, was far more cinematic than she'd intended. 

It came in the form of a gasp. Her skin crawled and bile threatened to boil at the back of her throat. This revelation was solid. It wasn't a guess, it wasn't a conspiracy, it was a surgically determined estimate, the sort of scientific diagnosis that she'd made hundreds of times before in her career. There was something too familiar about that medical file. 

It looked like one she would have been given before. She knew what that looked like and she sure as hell knew what a scar like that meant.

She should've known.

The night where Amelia had appeared in the doorway, drunk and gushing about New York and about how Beth had returned for Mark... there'd been something else. 

Addison had felt it. Amy had almost let something slip. 

Even while intoxicated, the youngest Shepherd had recognised the urgency in the secret, in the need to keep this from Addison. It'd been so big, so great that even while drunk Amy had pushed it aside. 

But even still, she'd implied that Beth hadn't just returned out of the kindness of her heart, out of pure love and forgiveness. There had been something more.

It made sense. Beth had never been the forgiving type. Suddenly, it made sense. She hadn't just been thinking about herself.

For a moment, Derek was sure that Addison was going to cry. 

She sat the medical file down as if it had physically burnt her. Suddenly, Addison was hit with the full force of what she'd done-- New York had been worse, so far worse than she'd ever even realised. Her dragon had done far more than steal the prince... she'd wrecked irreparable damage, the sort that had become far more than personal. 

She knew that type of personal, she'd felt it, she'd become familiar with it. It had been the same type of personal that had impeded on her life when she'd sat down and stared at her own pregnancy test, wondering whether having Mark Sloan's child was the answer to her problems.

(It hadn't been.)

"Beth was pregnant."

Addison had more in common with her sister than she'd thought.