*~ Handful of Eternity ~*
You can get sutures but it still stings

So I was a little faster at updating this time, but I'm not sure when the next one will be because of finals :d

It's only been a day, and already old scabs are bleeding.

Derek doesn't think they could get four more intricately connected people to sit at a table if they tried, unless perhaps they overturned history and resurrected Oedipus and his twisted counterparts. Mark's arm is tucked around Addison's shoulders as she uses his chest as an anchor instead of the back of her chair, and it doesn't cause little stabs of anger because he still loves her, but it is weird to see them so intimate with each other when he remembers all the times he left them alone in New York, all the times he trusted them.

Mark looks confused, he can read those stormy blue eyes after thirty years, and his lips are puckered, as if puzzling over some difficult medical conundrum. Addison, meanwhile, is tapping stiletto against the floor nervously. Meredith keeps checking her watch; Derek knows she is eager to go see Madeline.

"What are you saying?" Derek rasps.

"I need you to get Mark and Addison to agree to the bone marrow donation surgery."

If it was for anyone else, Derek would've long ago abandoned his nigh impossible mission, but it's for his baby girl who deserves to run again through summer grass and come inside sneezing from slight allergies, who should have a chance to see her mother try to hold back tears on her first day of preschool while she dipped ready fingers into pots of paint.

Addison had reluctantly left her kids in the not-so-able hands of Cristina (apparently Meredith thought it best not to mention that the only resident available for babysitting didn't like children) and so here they sit, reinventing the word complicated. A shape with this many angles and twists is never explained in geometry.

"We need to talk to you," he says, able to keep his voice from intensifying with anger, pain, and desperation, but only barely.

"We're here, Shep. Talk," Mark challenges, crossing forearms across a chest that ripples with muscle. His glance at Addison explains everything, though – he's protecting her temporarily fragile exterior. A second later he's a little appalled he can still read his betrayers so well.

How's he supposed to say it, though? We want your daughter to undergo surgery and risk her life to save ours? That's the truth stripped of all pretenses, all emotions, all implications.

Meredith begins, and Derek squeezes her hand gratefully under the table of the conference room. "Dr. Robbins is worried how much time it will take to give Sommer the filgrastim injections. Since yesterday didn't work, she still needs five days of them, plus the actual donation, and Madeline is … not doing well."

"What are you saying?" Addison whispers.

"To even do the injections, we might have had to sedate Sommer anyway," Derek says in what he hopes is a soothing, reasonable voice. "This isn't that much different, and it's completely safe …"

"You want her to have the surgery," Addison states blankly.

"Yes."

"She's three, Derek! Fucking three year olds aren't even supposed to donate in the first place. Now you want her to have surgery? After you punched me, called Addison Satan, and ran around this hospital acting like you're the goddamn victim?!" Mark boomed, leaning dangerously across the table at his ex-best-friend, but Addison's gentle grip on his forearm tugged him back.

"So now the adulterous, seducing bastard is the good guy?" Derek snaps back, incensed.

"Derek," Meredith mutters urgently while Addison simultaneously implores, "Mark."

"That shoulder matter," Meredith speaks up firmly, meeting all three of their eyes, those who were once best friends, inseparable, the Three Musketeers. "The past is bad. Really, really, bad and I don't know everything that's happened … but that shouldn't matter. Madeline is dying. Addison, Mark, you have to decide whether you're willing for Sommer to have a surgery that, while routine, could potentially put her life in danger. That's what you're deciding. Not whether it's justified, not whether Derek deserves it."

Derek slips an arm around Meredith's shoulders as a shaky breath tears through her small body. She still amazes him, even four years later, even in the face of her daughter's illness or her mother's insults; she maintains a backbone of steel. He catches his pseudo brother's eye briefly but that Adriatic blue is no longer easy to decipher.

Slowly, Mark turns to look at Addison, deep into her eyes while she stares into his, and he's about to interrupt before he realizes they're communicating. Not talking, yet they don't need privacy in order to share clandestine thoughts. An eternity elapses in a span of sixty seconds.

"Okay," Addison says finally. "Okay – but me and Mark want to be in the operating room, and you have to get the best surgical team in this whole hospital, and …"

"We have a no family policy," Meredith interrupts, almost inaudibly. "I'm sorry. But I'm sure," she quickly continues when they watch anguish wash across Addison's face, "that Derek can be in there. Can't you?"

"Of course," he reassures in a thinly veiled attempt at confidence, because his presence won't prevent anything – he won't be doing the procedure.

~*~

It is analogous to graduating med school, she thinks, except for the lingering dread. She should be ecstatic - her daughter, because of this donation, is most likely going to live. But she's being plagued by the instincts that nearly kept her in bed the day the patient with the bomb was admitted, the senses that warned her as she sank below the waters of her bathtub the time the ferry crashed.

Still, she smiles as Cristina sprints off to change scrubs dotted with spit-up and Brenner grins innocently when his father asks where George's pager went. She leaves when Addison tearfully informs Sommer that she will not be able to eat breakfast like her brother and sister at the hospital cafeteria because she's having a special doctor thing today. They don't look alike, but when the little girl cries she sounds exactly like Madeline.

She's on her way to visit her daughter when someone clamps her forearm tightly and tugs her into an on-call room. Her squeal is stifled by a large hand, and she tenses for a moment before recognizing the subtle hint of Derek's aftershave in the air.

"Sorry," he says with the wide, silly grin he wears on rare occasions as he removes his hand from her mouth. "I thought you might want to not be the subject of today's gossip, though."

Meredith lets forth a laugh and realizes that particular cadence hasn't been heard in a while – laughter is difficult to summon when your daughter is dying. Now she soaks up the hope pouring from Derek's eyes and sighs in pleasure as he moves to kiss her.

Almost as soon as their lips meet, she is surprised at her hunger for him, because even though they're high on jubilance and sex has been the last thing on her mind ever since Madeline was admitted, her body still needs him. As if he can sense her desperation, Derek quickly divests her of her scrub top as he pushes her back onto the thin mattress of the on-call room bed.

They continue to kiss, tongues tangling and hands exploring as articles of clothing are lost until she is lying bare beneath him, her chest expanding as his contracts. He smiles down at her for a minute and then scoots to the edge of the bed, his hand combing the floor for something.

He comes up with a black velvet box.

"Don't worry," he laughs when he sees her terrified, deer-caught-in-headlights expression. "I'm not asking you to marry me – yet. I know with Madeline being sick and all this isn't the right time. But Mer, I love you. I want to get married and stay together through everything until we're old and wrinkly. And I want everyone to know you're mine."

"So," he opens the box to reveal a simple, delicate gold ring with five tiny diamonds spaced intermittently around it in equal intervals. "This is a promise ring."

"Uh, Derek?" she giggles, wonder if he somehow gotten into the morphine. "It's a little late for that, you know …"

"Not that kind of promise ring, silly," he laughs. "This one means, well, that we'll love each other forever and that we belong to each other, because you're not ready to get married but I don't want to go another day knowing you could come to your senses and let some other guy whisk you away. So … please wear it."

Meredith accepts the ring gingerly and tries, under Derek's intense scrutiny, to comprehend what this means. It's a white picket fence instead of freedom, a promise instead of a hope, commitment instead of expectation.

"I don't want this to just be about Madeline getting better," she says slowly. "I'm happy, so happy, but -"

"That's not what this is," Derek insists. "I've had this forever, since right before Madeline relapsed. This is about you and me and you having our child and braiding her hair even when you've been on-call for a day and a half. This is about hair that smells like lavender and tiny, ineffectual fists and real life fairytales. This is about us."

She wants to hate him for being able to do this to her, but she can't, so she slides the cool, glimmering band onto her finger and kisses him, slow and keep, the gold throwing rainbows as he makes love to her and their daughter's fate hangs in the balance.

~*~

Mark still remembers the day he first held his daughter, staring at the tiny being with limbs like fragile leaves and lips like flower petals. He didn't think, back then, that it was possible for anyone to look as small as Sommer Lydia Sloan did in his arms that day, but today he is proved wrong.

The gurney dwarfs the little girl, her shock of wheat hair rippling down the back of the hospital gown that hangs on bony shoulders. Addison helped her into it, snapped the snaps and arranged small arms while Sommer looked on in confusion, too bewildered to even complain at the undesirable state of dress. She hasn't eaten since the night before, and first her tears expressed her frustration as Brenner ate a cookie shaped like a snowflake, then her red face expressed anger, and now she looks resigned.

He wishes he could explain it to her, but he's tried, numerous times, and she doesn't ever understand.

"Why, Dada?"

"We have to help Madeline get better. Don't you want to?"

"But I'm hungry."

"I'm sorry, baby, but you can't have any food."

"Daddy! Why?"

They're wheeling her towards the OR and it's all he can do not to put his hands on the moving bed and stop it, say wait, she doesn't deserve this, it isn't right. He and Addison are making this decision, not her, and they're making it for themselves, for Derek and Meredith and Madeline, but not for Sommer, the little girl sitting lost on the too-large bed, toenails painted fairy pink.

Her wide blue orbs, the color of earliest dawn, are killing him. He doesn't know what to say to her to make it all better this time.

"Sommer?" Addison says softly as they come to a halt, Derek standing ready in scrubs and his signature scrub cap, smiling down at Sommer as if he's known her for her whole life. Meredith is rocking Faye gently as he and Addison focus on their oldest girl. "You know Mommy and Daddy love you, right?"

Her small, porcelain head tilts forward in a slight nod before big, diamond tears fall down her cheeks. She doesn't know exactly what's happening, but she's picking up on the tense atmosphere, the adults' tight expressions, the fear in her brother's face as he eyes doors he is forbidden to pass.

"We love you so much," Addison chokes, stroking a few stray blonde wisps from Sommer's face, "and we would never, ever let anything bad happen to you, okay?"

"Momma?" his daughter responds as Mark places a hand on the small of Addison's back, steadying her. "Will you stay with me?"

He has to watch as the love of his life looks into the face of the child they created together and blatantly lies. "Of course, sweetie," she whispers, bending to hug Sommer once more.

"Mommy?" Brenner interjects from behind them. "Why is Sunny crying?"

"She's … she's just … a little …" Addison stumbles, clearly distraught over her lie.

"You wanna see her, bud?" Mark says quickly, tucking his hands under his son's armpits and spinning him up beside his sister. They are mirror images, the likenesses stunning, although they are of course not identical. Brenner throws his arms around his twin without reserve, hugging her in the sincere way only young children can.

"'S okay," he assures her. "Daddy says we can rent Mario Kart at the hotel, and you can be Peach."

"But you always beat me," Sommer wails.

"I won't. I won't beat you. I promise," Brenner vows. "And we can watch Sleepin' Beauty and Enchanted and lots of girl movies. Just please don't cry."

"Dr. Shepherd?" a nurse inquires, already in a surgical gown. "We're ready."

"Bye, baby," he whispers into skin that smells of her strawberry body wash. He lingers, but the instant is too short, all too soon Derek is pulling the gurney away, he is automatically lifting his son off of it, wrapping an arm around Addison's shoulders, half comforting, half restraining.

~*~

She usually hates rain but she's willing to forgive the sky for crying today, because it is doing what she can't, sitting alone in the lobby tracking trails of moisture. If she cries it will escalate into sobbing, which will wake Faye who she removed from the car seat in a desperate bid for comfort. Plus she's pretty sure the tall blonde resident and the one that looks like a puppy dog are spying on her.

Mark took Brenner somewhere to calm him, she isn't sure where, but his crying eventually garnered glares from others in the open lobby, so he parted, leaving her only with a quick kiss on the forehead. She keeps touching the spot with the pad of her index finger.

She lied to her daughter; put her at the mercy of needles that will be inserted into the iliac crest for precious marrow, and still she doesn't know if what she did was right.

A flash of cornflower catches her eye and Meredith smiles demurely as she sees Addison and settles opposite her. They are silent, and at another time she might have put the young resident out of her misery, asked after the question hovering on her lips, but today she can't do much of anything.

"You said there were two sides to every story," Meredith begins hesitantly, and she can't summon the will to tell the other woman all she wants is to be left here seeped in worry that she has failed her daughter. "What's yours?"

"Nice ring."

"Yeah, Derek and I … we're not engaged or anything," she explains quickly. "It's just kind of … I don't know. It says that we're together."

"Mmm."

"Look, you obviously meant what you said and if you were going to say it in the first place, you owe me an explanation. You might as well tell me because we've got time to kill and I know you were kicked out of the OR gallery for criticizing the anesthesiologist over the intercom thing in there and I'm sorry, but I can't let you back in."

Addison merely stares. Meredith is young, still, and she never did anything to warrant being dragged into this mess. She'd just loved Derek Shepherd, exactly as Addison had once upon a time, a man who hid complications behind his storybook prince smile.

"Derek, Mark and I," she sighs, "met in med school. Mark was the cocky, gorgeous playboy; Derek was the sweet, attentive lab partner. Mark hit on me and asked me to go to the nearest bar with him. Derek said I was beautiful and even though it was kind of silly, since we'd just met; he wanted to marry me someday. I was more attracted to Mark, but he scared me, so …"

"… so you chose the safer option. I don't blame you," Meredith assures her quickly. "I mean Derek's obviously a great guy and we … uh … call him McDreamy here, and Mark, well, even now I can picture what he was like."

"I put my dream of having a family and settling down ahead of love," Addison continues. "Not that I didn't love Derek, I did, but Mark could just look at me and I'd get this feeling. But he slept with a new girl every other night. And Derek and I were happy."

"So he proposed, you said yes, you got married and lived happily ever after until …"

"Until I slept with Mark." Meredith looks surprised at the certainty and frankness that lace her voice as she makes the statement. "It wasn't my proudest moment, but Mark and I fell in love. He was there, always, taking me out to dinner, getting me flowers and saying they were from Derek even though we both knew they weren't. Derek was just … never there."

"What do you mean? He's always home with Madeline when I'm working and -"

Addison massages her temples, wondering how to phrase this. "I'm not saying he's not a good father, or a good boyfriend, or whatever. We just weren't meant to be together, in the end. Our relationship became strained, we argued about kids, work, the plumbing, everything, until one day he just stopped. He spent all his time at the hospital and sent Mark on the dates he skipped. And one night … I was lonely and falling for him, and once you've started down that slope it's almost impossible to stop. Derek left without another word. I went to Mark."

"And then you got pregnant," Meredith finishes for her.

~*~

Nausea built inside her and she couldn't decide which was more debilitating: the child causing her body to produce hormones to make her feel this way, the fact that she just almost had an abortion, or that when she walked into Mark's apartment the day before he was sleeping with some slutty nurse from the hospital. It was a close race.

Swallowing forcefully, she pulled herself up the steps of the brownstone, thinking only of the comfortable couch that awaited her inside. She hadn't slept in her and Derek's bed since that fateful night he left. It amazed her that she could sink lower than that hellish night, but now she was pregnant with Mark's baby while he slept with half of New York City.

Addison unlocked the door and stepped inside, immediately alarmed as her eyes adjusted, revealing a figure standing casually in her kitchen. A second later, she identified him as Mark.

"Addie," he breathed in relief, hurrying from the kitchen into the hallway to embrace her tightly, an action that had previously made her feel protected and loved as her heart pressed up against his. But now she pushed him off. "Where were you? I tried your cell a couple times after the surgery, but you didn't answer."

"I was at a clinic," she stated dully, voice reflecting the aching numbness inside. "An abortion clinic."

She didn't think she'd ever seen the blood drain from someone's face so fast and in the end she had to look away from his pewter eyes, swimming with actual tears, something she didn't think she'd ever used in conjunction with Mark Sloan. "You … you didn't … the baby …"

"The baby is fine, Mark," she snapped, hating how his broken look forced her to give in to him again. "I couldn't do it, okay? You sleep with everything that moves and I couldn't get rid of your baby."

He had her in his arms faster than she could blink, reminding her with a tight embrace of all the reasons she loved him, how his heart housed her love, for better or for worse. Of picnics in Central Park and flowers on days patients died and even chocolates the second he sensed PMS. He was there emotionally, but cheating on her physically, while Derek had been tangible but obsessed with work. She couldn't decide which was better, so she pushed Mark off.

"Don't. I need you to go," she said coldly.

"What? But Addie …"

"Go home, Mark. Get out of my life. I trusted you not to hurt me, not to break me, because someday I won't be able to put myself together again. But you did. You don't love me, at least not enough to be monogamous for any length of time. So just … go. You aren't cut out for three a.m. feedings anyway."

"I'm not ready? You're the one who won't talk about him, who pretends everything's fine, who won't let me love you. I love you, Addison, and it scares me because I sure as hell have never been in love before but I love you."

"Get out."

"I won't abandon my kid," he told her as he stepped around her to the front door. "And I messed up and I'm sorry but that doesn't mean I don't love you. When you're ready, you know where to find me."

~*~

"Wow, I …"

"I know it's incredibly screwed up, all of it," Addison tells the younger woman. "And I know it's hard to take in. My point is, I guess … that everyone is acting like one night of illicit passion is worse than years of indifference and absence. And it's not."

"I should have known," Meredith whispers hoarsely. "I mean, no one's that perfect, and even if they were, they wouldn't want me. He never mentioned any of that, none of it, when I asked about New York and his past. He was just a blank slate."

"Look, Meredith, you seem like a good person and a good doctor and -" she halts midsentence. Derek is approaching, a grim look on his face, with a shorter, smaller surgeon with coffee colored skin, and Addison's heart plummets, her breath catches in her throat. One time Mark chocked on one of the kids' Jolly Ranchers from Halloween and now she knows how it feels to gasp desperately for air.

"What happened?"

"Addison, I'm …"

"What happened?!"

"She's fine now, but …"

Hehe sorry, another cliffhanger. But I hope you liked the chapter! Also, please check out our community Maddyson for some really good fic!