Remember How We Moved Together

Hey, all. Just a couple of quick notes before you start reading the story. First off, this can be read one of two ways: as a standalone one-shot or as a sort of prequel to my other full-length Addek fanfiction, Set to Self Destruct. Or even a back story for my other one-shot, Skeletons, if someone wanted to read it that way. If tying to STSD, I would suggest reading that story first, but it really doesn't matter all that much. This was meant to be posted in time for Christmas, but I was out of town so that ended up not working out. My apologies, and YES, I will be posting a new chapter of Set to Self Destruct SOON!

Decided to keep up with the STSD theme and name this after a Snow Patrol song. So, title is taken from the song "In the End" from their latest album, Fallen Empires.

It was late April when Derek Shepherd received the phone call that changed his life more than any other had ever done. He could see from the desk in his office the rows of well-kept flower beds, with battalions of tulips and lilies standing guard on the perimeter, all arranged symmetrically to the point of abnormality. He wondered as he sat idly behind his desk why the hospital chose such a boring landscape design. Surely they could afford better, something just slightly more creative...

While one part of his mind wandered, entertaining itself with spring flowers, another part kept quite still—seemingly having been stuck on the same thought for weeks... or perhaps months. But certainly not years, of course. Babies. They were everywhere. In the hallways, in the rooms, on television, in his reports, outside the windows separating him from the flowers, in the wombs of his coworkers, on the mind and tongue of his girlfriend...

It was no secret that he and Meredith had been trying to conceive for some time. And it was probably less of a secret that nothing seemed to be working. In fact, the secrecy status of either fact was irrelevant because secrets existed at Seattle Grace in much the same way that Derek's sister Amelia's rehab efforts existed: if you blinked, you missed them. Derek allowed a chuckle at his own joke, then settled his thoughts back where they had been. The flowers... no, Meredith—babies, everywhere.

He wondered how much longer Meredith would want to try before throwing in the towel—admitting that perhaps they should just get a dog and offer to babysit other people's kids more often. Derek privately had given up a long time ago. But, he never had the heart to tell her that. Having a child seemed to mean a lot to Meredith. He was never certain how to feel about that; was she compensating for her own terrible childhood, or was there really something more noble beneath her "dark and twisty" exterior? Perhaps it was best that he didn't think of that.

He sighed, tried to focus on the paperwork in front of him, or at least revert back to thoughts of springtime, but it seemed to be too late; the damage was done. He was not sure how he really felt about having children with Meredith anymore. Of course, he wanted to be a father—had always imagined himself with children. But all of the effort he was putting forth trying to conceive was killing their sex life. It seemed mechanical, forced lately, and he was certain that it was due to their desire to procreate instead of a symptom of something greater or worse...

Fortunately, at that moment, the surgeon was saved from darker thoughts by the unnerving vibration of cell phone on hard desk. Pulling from his revery with a sharp intake of air, he reached for the rectangular object quaking on the cherry wood. He didn't recognize the number, but that was hardly anything out of the ordinary. "Derek Shepherd," he stated reflexively.

"Oh my God, I'm so glad you answered," the person on the other end gushed in a rush of relief.

He frowned, sure that he recognized the voice, especially when considered against the area code, but a little put-off because that voice had only been a bearer of bad news for some years now. "Naomi? Is everything okay?"

"Far from it. We've got an emergency—well, St. Ambrose, the hospital we collab with, has an emergency. They—we—need you."

"Okay," he said slowly, leaning back in his chair and propping his sneaker-clad feet atop his desk. "What's the case?"

"This little girl. She was Amelia's patient, and she has this big surgery coming up, but obviously Amelia can't do it now, but this girl's parents have been waiting so long—"

"Hang on," Derek interrupted, "what do you mean? Why can't Amelia do it?"

"I—thought you knew..."

"Know what? I've not heard from her since she was in Seattle." He would not admit to anyone that he worried about his sister. He wanted to pretend that Amelia's mistakes were all her own; that neither he nor the traumatic event they had shared had any relevance to the messed-up person that she had become. Not dealing with her problems made coping with his own issues easier, kept him from falling into the pit of despair along with her.

"I don't feel like I'm the person to tell you this, Derek..." The nervousness and concern in his friend's voice, unrelated to the case she was calling about, only raised Derek's already heightened anxiety.

"Naomi. You can tell me. What has she done now?"

"Are you sure you wouldn't rather talk to Addison or your mother—or someone who—someone else...?" Derek wondered what her line of thought had been. Someone who—what? Someone who knew her? Someone who could handle difficult situations? Someone who was family, even?

"No, I'm sure. Just tell me."

There was a pause on the other end of the phone, which Derek briefly imagined must have been for dramatic effect; nothing his baby sister did could surprise him. "She had an accident. She was using and the time and—well, she's okay, but she's in rehab now. They're—they're going to take her medical license if she slips up again."

Derek nodded, though there was no one around to see or care. "Well, none of that is very surprising. I often wonder how she got through school without much incident. Anyway, what's the case and when do I need to be there?"

Naomi proceeded to brief him about a seven-year-old girl with severe, incapacitating epilepsy. She needed a difficult procedure to essentially disconnect the two hemispheres of her brain, as this was the only way to reduce falling, and the child had already suffered several injuries as a result. In the end, Derek agreed—what else could he do? It had long been his job to clean up after hurricane Amelia blew through. Not to mention, a change of pace and the chance to visit with old friends would be nice.

That was how he found himself sitting nervously in a cab outside St. Ambrose Hospital three days later. Though his nerves had little to do with the surgery as he was a veteran twice-over of the procedure, but instead more to do with seeing the old friends that he had initially been excited to meet up with. Sam, one of his best friends from college and Naomi's ex, had just broken up with Addison, one of his best friend's from their failed marriage. He wasn't sure this would be a cheerful visit after all.

"You getting out, or are you just gonna sit there and run up the meter? Either way's fine by me, but I'm getting tired of staring at these friggin' flower beds," came the voice of the cab driver, a gruff guy who looked more like a truck driver.

"Oh, right. Yeah, sorry." Derek paid the man and entered the hospital, found his way to the surgical floor and was trying to hunt down the nurses' station when he heard a familiar voice talking to someone around the corner. Derek froze, unashamedly wanting to hear more.

"I just need to stay busy. If I'm busy, I'm fine; I don't have time to think about it. If I took the day off, you know that I would just sit around and mope."

"Yeah, but you know he's home. You could at least act like you care that the man you love just walked out of your life."

"Charlotte! I do care. Maybe … maybe this is a good thing, though. I don't think it was right. For either of us. We wanted different things."

"Uh-huh," said the woman who was not his ex-wife, then, loudly, "Can I help you sir?" Derek felt his ears go red.

He stuck his head around the corridor. "Hey, sorry, didn't want to interrupt." He was struck at once by the sight of her: auburn hair long and pulled back haphazardly as it had been in New York, large eyes a startling green today. He was certain that—whatever their differences, relationship status, or age—he would always think his ex-wife to be the most beautiful creature he had had the pleasure of meeting.

In a brief moment, Addison's arms were around his neck and he found himself instinctively wrapping arms about her in return. "Hey, Addison, how have you been?" He wasn't sure why his voice cracked halfway through her name.

She pulled back, smiling. "I'm well. Really well." She glanced toward the blonde standing next to her with a raised eyebrow, arms folded over her chest. "Charlotte, this is Derek. Derek Shepherd, the neurosurgeon you wanted."

Charlotte smiled, though Derek thought it seemed a bit wry. "I can see where Amy gets her looks. Charlotte King, chief of staff around these parts. Glad Naomi was able to convince you to come on short notice.

"Oh, yes. No problem at all." He smiled, glanced between them with hands clasped behind his back. "Anyone want to show me to the patient's room?"

It was Charlotte who volunteered, but before they turned to head the other direction, he caught Addison's gaze. "Are you busy tonight?"

"I—well, no. Not really." The look on her face showed hesitation.

"Have dinner with me? You pick the restaurant, I'll pay." The word were out before he had really decided to ask them.

She bit her lip, and Derek knew from over a decade of marriage that that meant she wanted to say yes, but thought it might be a bad idea. It was the same look with which she confronted ice cream and dresses with a deep neck. "See you at eight?" she suggested, voice a little higher than normal.

"Sounds good. I'll meet you … in the lounge?" She nodded, and Derek left behind Charlotte, feeling a little better than he had before.

By eight o'clock, though, there was a definite spring in his step. The surgery had been tremendously successful and the family of the little girl enormously thankful. They had even offered to pay for his plane ticket back, which he had had to decline repeatedly. He had then gone to lunch with Sam and Naomi around two while Addison was in surgery. The same scenario had been executed many times over during medical school and residency, but the changes in the dynamics were odd; Sam was being rather awkward toward Derek, and Derek was sure he caught Naomi looking at Sam out of the corner of her eye more often than was normal for someone who didn't feel more for him than she let on.

At four, he had phoned Meredith to tell her of his dinner date with Addison, with which she had had no problem, though she expressed her desire for him to return home that night rather than in the morning. He explained his non-refundable ticket.

Then at five he had showered and changed, laid around in the lounge watching reruns of a sitcom, waiting for Addison to finish her evening rounds.

He was halfway through another episode of The Big Bang Theory (which was decidedly not his taste) when she finally showed up. From the doorway, she looked lovely, he had to admit. She wore a boatneck cashmere sweater over gauchos and flats—terms he only knew because his Christmas shopping lists had always contained more women than men, having four sisters, nine nieces, and one very high-maintenance wife. He knew, too, that while anyone else might look at her and see casual effortlessness, this particular wardrobe choice reflected her deep-seated desire to be noticed—if only by him, if only for tonight. Those flats were practically a cry for help.

"You're late," he remarked, but with a careful smile. "But," he added as he sat up on the couch, "I'll let it slide because you look very nice."

She smiled softly, but he didn't miss the slight roll of her shamrock-green eyes; she still couldn't take a compliment. "Thank-you, Derek. You clean up pretty well yourself."

Opting to bypass an awkward moment, he immediately followed up with, "So where are we going?"

"Well, I thought that maybe we could hit up this surf and turf place by the coast. They have this amazing lobster soup... and pretty much the best bartender in SoCal." The last part rolled off her tongue a little too easily and Derek wondered if she had been drinking alone lately, hoped she wasn't in some sort of trouble beyond her issues with Sam.

But instead of voicing his concerns now, he simply smiled and stood up from the couch, thinking that perhaps with a little bit of alcohol in them she would open up to him. "That sounds like a wonderful choice. Let me get my coat."

o0o0o

Sitting across from Derek Shepherd really made Addison nervous. It shouldn't, by any means, but he was there and he reeked of charm and things had not exactly been going well for her. For one, she wanted a child more than she had ever really wanted anything else, and second, the man she had been with for some time now had left her because of that desire. Addison told everyone that it had been random, that she didn't understand—but she understood. Sam had reluctantly (and, she thought, "reluctantly" was putting his reaction mildly) agreed to Addison's fertility treatments several months ago, but they didn't seem to be working. Addison could tell that his heart was not in it, and it probably made her a terrible, selfish person for it, but her desire to reproduce far outweighed her desire to make Sam happy. Not that she would ever admit that to anyone, even herself; only letting the notion flit through her mind before falling asleep or as the burn of vodka or gin scorched her throat. It had only been a matter of time before Sam left her, she knew. And when she started talking about IVF using donors? He had lost it, and it was then that Addison knew that if she somehow got pregnant, she would otherwise die alone.

And now, here she was, eating dinner and having drinks with her equally childless ex-husband, who wasn't technically married but might as well be. Things were not at all how she pictured them twenty years ago.

"Are you okay?"

His words brought her back to the present, and she realized that she had been staring at his plate. True to her breeding, she recovered quickly and pasted a smile on her face. "Oh, yes. Quite." She wondered if he still knew her well enough to see through her—though, he had not been especially good at that toward the end. Or, more likely, he had just stopped caring enough to even try to read between her "I'm fine"s and "don't worry about it"s.

He frowned, though, and Addison was not sure whether she was glad or upset that her façade had fallen through. She was normally quite good at acting okay when she wasn't, but maybe, a small portion of her brain reasoned, she wanted someone to know that all was not well.

"You can talk to me, Add. We can, you know, be friends," he murmured, as though the words were restricting his airway.

"Okay," she agreed slowly. "You first, then. No kids, no marriage. What's going on with you?"

To her surprise, he laughed. "Oh, we have a marriage."

"Really?" She couldn't help but catch his infectious, classically Shepherd smile even though the news set about a gnawing sensation in her stomach. "I didn't hear about this."

"Well, it was kind of small. In the locker room, on a post-it..."

Addison laughed in earnest this time. "Oh. My god. That is not a wedding. I don't know what it is, but it's not a wedding."

He didn't say anything for a moment—only looked at her, a peculiar little smile playing on his lips and dancing in his eyes. She almost felt uncomfortable under his gaze, completely oblivious to what he could be thinking.

"Are you happy, Addison?" he asked softly after what seemed to her an eternity. His face had gone rather quickly from joviality to stark seriousness, fingers crossed on the table in front of him.

"Ugh," was all she could get out. "I need more alcohol for this kind of conversation." She laughed a little laugh as she said it, but still downed her martini in one gulp. "Sam left me."

Derek nodded gravely. "I heard. I'm sorry, Add. Though … can I speak frankly?"

She waved a hand. "By all means."

He frowned slightly then, "I never saw you two together. I didn't know, when I first asked you out back in school, that he was hung up on you. I'm not sure he really was. But it became obvious after a while; people often want what they can't have."

"Is that true for you?" she asked, perhaps a little too quickly, a little too directly.

He threw back most of his scotch, sucked air through his teeth with a grimace and studied her for a moment before answering, "Perhaps there were times in my life when that was true, but I like to think that I've grown since then. I want what I want, what I need. It's that simple."

Her brow furrowed unconsciously as she tried to unravel just what he meant. She was spared further critical thought by the arrival of their waitress with more drinks.

"I hope you both have a taxi on standby," she said reprovingly as she settled another pricey scotch before Derek and a very dry martini before Addison.

"Yes, ma'am," answered the neurosurgeon with a smile, and the obstetrics surgeon could hear the slight slur in his speech that others might miss.

"You dodged my question earlier," she pointed out, toying with the speared olive in her glass, just barely meeting his eyes.

"Surely not," he said, straight-faced, but there was laughter behind his words.

Addison smiled, nodding and watching the olive swirl in the clear mixture. "You did, actually. You seem..." Her eyes met his full-on now, and she was surprised to see a kind of sadness reflected in them, "...different." She hadn't intended to get this tipsy, really. But now that she was, things she normally would never say were rolling off her tongue.

Derek heaved another heavy sigh, took another long drink from his glass, but this time there was no wince. "Meredith is trying to conceive," he said baldly.

Something about those simple words stung Addison. Maybe it reflected her own difficulties, or maybe it spoke to a finality in her relationship with Derek that she had never before been able to admit to. Maybe, she thought, she just wasn't capable of letting him go—not really—and that thought scared the hell out of her more than anything else.

"So... this is a problem?" she found herself asking amidst the turmoil going on in her alcohol-laden brain.

He laughed at that; a short mirthless thing. "I guess you could say that. It's not working. Nothing is working, and I don't think it's meant to be, but how do I tell her that?"

She had no idea what to say. "Do you even want kids?" She decided to punctuate that awful, rude question by finishing off her third martini (which was really little more than a glass of gin).

"Yeah. I do," was all he said, but he sounded hopeful, quite unlike the tone in his previous statements.

"But not with her." Another gem. Addison could have kicked herself.

"No. I suppose not with her."

Addison felt her stomach lurch in a way completely unrelated to alcohol consumption. "Then what do you want?"

"Honestly, Addison?" His face looked older, a little more sober than he probably was. "I came down here not for that girl, not for Amelia, or Naomi. I just wanted to see you... To know how you're doing."

"I'm doing fi—" she began, instinctively trying to block out anything overly nice he might be trying to say, but there was no reason to lie to him when he was being so open with her—and, not to mention, it seemed to be doing her no good up til then anyway.

"Addie, I think we made a mistake," he said seriously, and that was all Addison remembered of their conversation at the restaurant.

The next thing she could really picture was her all but falling out of the taxi in front of her door, Derek bursting out laughing at her, but still attempting to catch her as he did so. They both ended up on the sidewalk, cackling like the drunken hyenas they were. Addison was slapping his shoulder in a half-committed attempt to shut him up, but she was, of course, laughing just as hard.

After several minutes of this, Derek finally managed to stand, offering her his hand and breathing as though he had just ran a marathon. "Let's get you inside before we're both arrested for public intoxication," he said with a chuckle as she took his outstretched hand.

She didn't complain when he didn't let go as they walked up to her door, arms swinging between them slightly. She couldn't remember the last time someone had just held her hand like that, as though they were teenagers without a care in the world. Even though they weren't young anymore and definitely had their fair share of cares, Addison felt content, with just him holding her hand in his. Everything felt okay for the first time in a very long time.

At her door, she had to release herself rather reluctantly to fumble with her keychain, finally managing to stumble inside. "Do you... would you like something to drink?" Putting words together that made sense was not as easy as it had been prior to the martinis.

Derek shook his head, slowly approaching her, still in his shoes and jacket, which normally would have really bugged her. "All I want … is standing right here in front of me," he mumbled, and Addison froze, realization of his intentions dawning on her at last. Looking back, there would be no way she could claim that she was at all reluctant...

He placed a hand at her hip, lifted an index finger to tilt her chin upward so that she had no choice but to meet his lust-darkened, hungry eyes. "I have missed you so much, Addie," he whispered. "Tell me, please, that we can try again. Tell me to stay and I'll stay."

Her lips moved, but no sound came out, very much like a fish on dry land. After losing herself in the intensity of his gaze for what seemed a lifetime, she nodded dumbly. "Stay. Stay with me." And she was surprised that it was her lips that made first contact, her eyes that fluttered closed first, her hands untucking his shirt...

Before she knew how they had gotten there, her ex-husband was settling her onto her bed, planting kisses wherever he could find skin as they fell into old habits with renewed desires. She hated to remember their last few failed attempts at love-making, recalling how hard it had been not to picture his best friend instead, how much concentration it took for her to keep in mind that Derek was her husband, the man she loved. But now? Now it was too damn easy; too easy to forget Mark, Sam, Meredith... Right now, it was just the two of them again, reunited in a blaze that more than made up for past infidelities.

He was all over her in a way she couldn't remember him being since probably their honeymoon—though they had been quite drunk for that, too. There was nowhere his hands couldn't go, teeth wouldn't scrape. She was so thoroughly enjoying herself that she couldn't be bothered to even begin to wonder what people would whisper behind her back about the inevitable bite marks he must have been leaving in his frenzy.

And she didn't know the time when they finally fell into one another, exhausted and overheated. All she remembered was an arm wrapped around her waist, a body pressed up against hers...

But when she awoke, there was no arm, no body. All that was left behind was his smell. She had had to wash her sheets three times to really get rid of him. What else had she expected? That he would drop his life and move in with her? She considered trying his mobile, but in the end decided against it, resolved to let it go. In all honesty, she probably would have left him, too if he hadn't beaten her to it.

Even still, like the flowers of spring, their business was not finished. She would see his smile again.

If you're interested in a sequel or have put this on your story alerts, be aware that this IS a one-shot companion piece to my story, Set to Self Destruct, which picks up after the events here.