ON ANOTHER PATH

In another life, where Mark and Addison are happily married, there are still a number of seemingly insurmountable struggles to overcome.

Trigger warning for miscarriage and infertility.

Massive AU, no spoilers to be seen.

Because they always have been and always will be my OTP, and I still can't let them go…

EPILOGUE

I've tried to write this with a slightly different feel, so we can cover the whole story, and so I can give all the closure that I want to! You've been a brilliant bunch throughout this fic, and I'd love to hear from you all one last time! I'm so glad you've enjoyed it, and I hope the epilogue satisfies :)

Orla's first morning at school, you straighten the oversized blazer on her little shoulders and tuck a strand of vibrant red behind her ear. She looks both so grown up and so young at the same time, in her smart school uniform, almost like a child playing at adulthood.

Choosing a school hadn't been easy. You hadn't realised, before you'd tried, quite how confusing the whole thing was, quite how difficult. Every woman you knew, however vaguely, with a child, had an opinion, and most of the ones without. There are more schools in your area of New York than you could even have imagined, and they all seem to have both their flaws and their advantages.

In the end, you (and Mark, under duress, though from the moment he'd realised all the complications, you supposed he had deduced having as little of his own opinion as possible on the subject was the safest bet) had decided to send her to the one Savvy's kids had been at for years now, and despite all your efforts, had not been able to find a bad report about. It's a mixed school, you'd both been certain of that from the moment you started looking (your own personal experience had taught you that you could meet just about anyone in school, however much you weren't looking) and right on the edge of the busy part of town, with a large green and its own swimming pool.

And it's got a smart uniform, with a little red rimmed blazer, a straight skirt and bright red socks. As your little girl stands in front of you at the front door of the brownstone, excited eyes and an almost impatient look on her face, your heart swells slightly, and you feel a tear prick behind your eye.

She puts her hands on her hips. "I'm going to be late, Mommy." She frowns, and you swallow, just for a moment. Because this is your backwards everything, this is exactly the way it should be, this is both yours and Orla's haphazard route to perfect.

Mother's Day, just before Orla's seventh birthday, you don't get home until gone midday after more than 12 hours in the hospital – you'd somehow managed to get the on call shift unavoidably that year – and you're just about ready to crash, when Orla comes bursting into the hallway from the kitchen with a bouquet of flowers almost as big as her (she's still a tiny little thing, at least half an inch shorter than anyone else in her class at school).

"Mommy!" she gushes, thrusting the flowers at you. "You're home!"

You suddenly find all your fatigue and exhaustion slipping away. The look on her face fills you with an increasing warmth, and as Mark follows behind her, with a somewhat stressed smile on his face (flower arrangement has never been one of his skills) you find the grin on your face almost uncontrollable.

"Do you like them, Mommy?" she suddenly looks nervous, and a blush spreads on her cheeks. "I picked them all by myself. I didn't pick pink because that's my favourite colour, not your favourite colour, so I picked purple."

You press a kiss to her forehead, lifting the huge and heavy bouquet out of her arms. "They're beautiful, Princess. I love them."

You pick her up from school one day when she's in fourth grade, and something isn't right. She's sullen and she doesn't respond to any of your gentle questions as to what might be wrong. When you get back to the house, she walks silently into the kitchen, sets her homework on the breakfast bar and starts on her 12 times table without looking up.

"Do you want a drink and a snack, sweetheart?" you ask, and she shakes her head, not meeting your eyes.

Something feels queasy and unsettled in your stomach, but you don't push. There seem to be walls around her you've never seen, and it makes you uneasy. For one horrified and panicking moment you imagine that you've finally hit the wall you've been dreading – she's finally realised that you'll always be her second best, you'll never be her Ma. You swallow that thought. You've never had anything but a healthy parent daughter relationship.

After she's finished her homework, Orla quietly skulks upstairs, muttering something about going to read, and you hitch a breath, trying to form a sentence out of thousands of thoughts in your head, but come out with nothing at all. You put the dinner on, checking the time. Mark will be back from an earlier shift today, you'll discuss this with him. She shouldn't be quite in the sullen teenager phase just yet.

When Mark does come home, however, Orla comes bounding down the stairs, saying 'Dad, I need to talk to you' in a heavy voice, not quite able to meet his eyes, and he gives you a slight frown before ushering her into the living room, wrapping his arm around her shoulders, closing the door behind him.

The sound travels all too easily in the brownstone, and hovering outside the door you catch snippets.

Said nobody wanted me…

Said that's why I'm so ugly, because my pretty mom's not my real mom…

Said you found me on the street, like a stray dog…

Children are horrible, you realise, as the fragments of the story of the bullies reach your ears. You listen, a tiny smile finding its way onto your face, to Mark running her through her real story firmly and calmly, telling her the boys were probably only picking on her because they were jealous of her, and reassuring her that she could always tell her Mom or Dad anything.

It's what she says in response to that that catches your breath.

"I didn't want Mom to know, though. I thought it would make her sad. Because she thinks she's my real Mom like I think she's my real Mom, and I didn't want them to bully her as well…"

You both have a word with both Orla's fourth grade teacher and the headmaster shortly after that, and there's a widely spread anti bullying campaign put into place in the school, and the aforementioned boys are punished accordingly. It turns out it had all started when Orla got picked for the hockey team before the leader of the small gang of nine year old boys.

You settle beside Mark that evening, after your husband had had quiet words with your daughter, who'd told him with a bright flush on her cheeks that all three of the boys had apologised to her personally and were going to be stacking all the tables and chairs at the end of the day in their classroom for three weeks.

"She's never not told me anything before." You sigh, and he looks at you, almost a smile on his face.

"You heard what she said. She didn't want them to hurt you. Because you're her Mom, that's what she said. She's looking after her Mom from a young age… you can't complain about that."

You give him a small smile. "I'm not sure I want her to think she needs to protect her Mom and run to her Dad to fight her battles…. You know, feminism and all that…"

Mark laughs, kissing you square on the lips, tangling his fingers into your hair. "You can't have it both ways, Red… even the bullies said you were her pretty Mom… before you know it you'll be her hot Mom, and that's when you've got to worry…"

His kisses silence your laughter as he leans over you, legs tangling, hands suddenly wandering, fingers on the hem of your negligee. And for a while, your worries dissolve.

Before you know it, Orla's about to start high school, and your daughter standing impatiently in the doorway this time is even more frightening. Somewhere between ninth and tenth grade she became all long, slender legs and found herself a body shape that started resembling a woman, rather than a little girl. She doesn't look anything like a child playing at adulthood anymore, she looks like she's almost there, and that has even more of an ability to floor you. Because where is the time going, really? It seems like yesterday Mark was bundling her onto his shoulders and you were having difficult conversations about heaven and what she should call you and whether she'd like to stay. Now she's chamming on gum, tapping her heel and checking her shiny new watch.

You take a deep breath. "Come on then. You don't want to be late." You force a moderately strained smile. She rolls her eyes, but doesn't say anything.

She doesn't say a lot in the passenger seat of your vehicle until you reach the block just round the corner from the high school. Spontaneously, she leans forward and pecks your cheek, and for a second you feel her heart thumping.

"You're going to be fine, Princess." You whisper, and you expect an eye roll at the term of endearment she's been desperately trying to shake, but she just gives you a small smile.

"See you tonight, Mom."

"Love you." You half whisper and she takes a deep breath and slides out of the car.

Something catches in your throat as you drive to the hospital.

She settles into high school with an ease you almost envy. And you'd always thought it was a cliché, but suddenly it seems like her life is flashing before your eyes, and where one moment she barely came up to your knee and was two huge, inquisitive blue eyes between red curls, she's now half an inch taller than you, endless long pale legs, hair of a slightly more refined rich auburn, and she's bringing a boy home from her Math class for dinner, and Mark's trying to pull his most threatening of faces as you just laugh.

Charlie, that first boyfriend, lasts a little over two weeks, and though he seems like a nice boy, you don't suppose he's anywhere near good enough for your daughter. And then you laugh at yourself, because you've become that mother without even realising it. When you mention it light-heartedly to Mark that evening he frowns slightly and informs you there'll never be anyone good enough for Orla, especially not a high school boy, he knows from personal experience what they're like.

Charlie is followed by Callum in senior year, and even Mark likes Callum, you think. He's not a jock, which your husband assures you is always a good thing (although you gently point out to him that he himself was captain of the football team two years running, and he didn't turn out to be that bad), and she met him in Biochem, so you suppose maybe he's not all that bad. He takes her to Senior Prom, and for a moment your world freezes.

Your daughter, almost six foot of her now, in a long, smooth dress somewhere between jade and emerald, with all those curls tucked behind her head, a few cascading over her shoulders.

She comes home a little before midnight in tears, though; of course she does, it's Senior Prom; with choked sobs saying something about catching Callum kissing one of the cheerleaders out in the locker corridor, and overhearing Bianca Richards laughing at even the notion of Orla Sloan even being considered for Prom Queen.

You help her unlace her dress, release all the bobby pins from her hair, and you make her a hot chocolate as she gets into her most comfortable pair of pyjamas, wiping the mascara tear stains from her face. You sit on the end of her bed until the early hours of the morning (despite being on call the following day) talking about everything and nothing and feeling again, as you haven't in a long time, how little she still is.

When she goes to college, you realise you can hardly remember the house feeling this empty. Mark takes you in his arms that night and although you know each other's bodies back to front – you've been doing this for more than thirty years – it somehow feels different.

You feel… old.

You only start feeling older when Orla starts talking med school, and forming her own opinions on which schools she should be looking at, and where she'd like to end up working, and considering something as adult as specialisms before she's even gotten in.

Of course, she gets in without even the tiniest of hurdles, and as she jets off to Harvard with a fantastic GPA and a head full of ambition behind her, you wonder, if only for a second, whether she would have done it all herself, regardless of you. She's been headstrong and independent, your daughter, ever since you can remember, really. Maybe she was always going to find her way in life, whatever it threw at her.

Mark quashes that notion practically before it's out of your mouth.

"You can remember how she was, that night in the hospital waiting room, if you think about it, Addie… she was all alone in the world, all of a sudden… and she looked so small…" he tucks a strand of red absentmindedly behind your ear. "I'm not saying she wouldn't have found a lovely home wherever she'd ended up… but she was lucky, to find you, Red… and she knows that, and she says that regularly… you're just being daft, because you're getting all emotional because she's going to be in Massachusetts for the next four years…"

You return him a little half-hearted giggle, but you rest your forehead against his, breathing a sigh of relief.

"And you."

His eyes are questioning.

"She was lucky to find you, too. I knew that from the moment you started talking about Billy the Goat…"

As he laughs, and catches you lips with his own, you muse that you don't suppose you'll ever cease to find that deep, almost growling chuckle of his kind of arousing.

Time flows by, like you can't get a handle on it. Orla takes up an internship in your hospital, which makes both of you smile, although she makes you solemnly promise to 'butt out' of anything to do with her, and with that solemn honesty she's had since you met her she informs you she'd really rather her new colleagues didn't know she was the daughter of the Head of Plastics and one of the pink scrub wearing lot from the NICU. That makes you both laugh, and she frowns at you, and rolls her eyes, and for a moment you wonder how someone completely genetically different from both of you can sometimes react in a way that is a perfect combination of you two.

She passes her internship comfortably (despite a few weeks regressing into not dissimilar to her grumpy teenage years when studying for the finals) and starts a residency in the ER, with a sudden but somehow fitting interest in becoming a trauma surgeon.

Time keeps ticking by, completely out of your control.

She meets David one night on an emergency shift – he's the on call anaesthetist who's been working for nearly 24 hours, and it's the first emergency on call shift she's taken completely by herself. So they're both running on the end of their tethers, they're both grumpy, exhausted and stressed to a degree you still suspect anyone outside the medical profession wouldn't quite understand, but somehow, sparks fly.

You take it very lightly – she's never been one to have more than a casual boyfriend – but when Mark threatens the poor guy (and he's the first one he's bothered to threaten) you start contemplating the idea that this might be serious.

Sure enough, your husband walks your daughter down the aisle eight months later, and watching the two most important people in your world walking between the pews, your beautiful, incredible daughter and the only man who's ever really known you, you don't feel old, as expected, but suddenly so overwhelmed with a sense of contentment and pride that you feel the tears behind your eyes.

And as you watch them dance the second dance later in the evening, sure you catch the sparkle of a tear in Orla's eye, and certain you see one in Mark's, you contemplate how life turns out.

Because you remember that overwhelming feeling, when you finally accepted that you were never going to have a biological child, that your life was over and you were never going to be complete. But you look over at Orla throwing her arms around Mark and holding tight at the end of the song, and you realise what you said to a frightened two year old, all those years ago, couldn't have been more right.

There are plenty of ways to find your perfect family.

FINIS

That's a wrap! You've all been fabulous, the whole way through, and I would love to hear what you think of the ending! Thank you in advance for all your lovely reviews :)