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Like most surgeons, Addison was a geek in high school. The kids who grew up to be surgeons were not the kids who fit in with normal people. They already had that obsessive quality, the thing that made them a geek in high school and would make them a brilliant surgeon once they got into the arena.
Addison was a band geek, which wasn't so much an obsession as the least horrifying extra-curricular activity her school offered. She needed to fool colleges into thinking that she was a well-rounded individual, not just some dork who spent all her time studying.
She didn't. Spend all her time studying, that is. Anyone who saw her grades might have jumped to that conclusion, but academics were not Addison's obsession.
Anyone who paid attention to her would have figured it out, though. Addison carried around paperbacks with her everywhere, some with cheesy covers featuring half-naked women (which even a band geek knew was the kind of cover it was best to hide from people, even if it had sort of been the reason she'd bought them), some with more elegant scenes like a star field or a wormhole, marking them clearly as science fiction.
She read in between classes, and in class, if the teacher was a particularly ineffective one. The rules of the worlds she read about seemed simultaneously easier and harder than the rules of high school. The concepts fascinated her. Not the standard good-versus-evil stuff, because pretty much anything could be about that, but faster-than-light travel, artificial intelligence, cloning – these were the things she pondered. The areas connected with genetics held her attention longer than the physics side of things, but there was one idea she kept turning over and over in her head.
Time travel. The thought of travelling through time, backwards or forwards, so that you could see something again, or see something from the future, or change something, or do something that you weren't supposed to do but actually were supposed to, where cause and effect were blurred together, and where trying to stop something made it happen… it fascinated her. Could there be two of you existing at any one particular time, and what would happen if you met? Would the future-you remember this incident having happened, because for them it had already happened, or would they not remember until it had happened, or would they not remember ever because they were really from a parallel universe in which it hadn't happened and would never happen?
As a seventeen-year-old who had never been kissed, Addison was pretty sure that it was the fact she spent so much time thinking about this kind of stuff that made her a geek, and not the fact that she had picked one of the dorkiest groups to belong to for extra-curricular purposes.
It was around that time she had a dream, except it was much more vivid than a normal dream, in which she was watching herself dancing at her own wedding. An older version of herself, who even looked sort of attractive, or confident at least, dancing with this guy with dark hair and amazing eyes.
When she met Derek several years later, it was, she told herself, just a coincidence that he reminded her so much of the man in her dream. It had been a long time ago, and her memories of the dream were no doubt being shaped and altered by her knowledge of Derek, and there was no need to think too much about it.
She was a surgical intern, and she had no time for reading anything other than case histories and medical journals, if that. No time for contemplating things that all adults knew only belonged in fiction. She wasn't in high school anymore.
When he proposed to her, it was intended as a surprise, she knew, which was why she gasped and acted as though she'd had no idea it was coming. She said yes, because she loved him, but also because she knew that she had, already, somewhere, somehow.
She reminded herself that it was only a dream. But when the song played at the reception, the song that she could remember, she glanced around the room. Just in case.
If it hadn't been for the fact that most days, days when she wasn't in exquisite white wedding dresses, she felt like seventeen-year-old Addison inside, she might have overlooked the girl, might have assumed she was someone from Derek's family she hadn't yet met. But it was her, and Addison looked at herself looking at herself for a moment, and then she was gone.
She didn't tell Derek about it. She counted up the glasses of champagne she'd had – only two, damn it – and in the days after the wedding spent her time looking up articles and reports on hallucinations. Her conviction that she'd already been there had to have been what caused the hallucination, she decided.
It was almost two years later when Derek began talking about inviting a new surgeon at the hospital over for dinner. When the face of Mark Sloan matched up exactly with the man an older Addison had been kissing in her too-vivid dream the night before, Addison took a deep calming breath and reminded herself that she had known Mark had been coming to dinner, that she had dreamt about him for no reason other than that, and that she had doubtlessly seen him around the hospital prior to this introduction.
If she genuinely believed she was seeing things that had yet to happen, it was dangerous. She knew that. It fell under the category of delusional thinking, and that was the sort of thing surgeons who wanted to succeed needed to avoid.
And several years later, when Derek was never around and permanently elsewhere in his head when he was, Addison tried to fool herself into thinking that kissing Mark was a spur-of-the-moment decision, that she was reaching out for comfort instead of doing what she'd known she would do.
The second time she kissed him, she didn't need to look to know that her younger self was watching. And anyway, she hadn't looked at herself before. So she wouldn't now.
She wasn't actually sure whether it was wouldn't or couldn't, but she didn't think she wanted to find out.
And as long as she didn't look, she could pretend that it was all just a silly game. Under the stresses of being a surgeon and having a husband who, these days, barely noticed she was alive, it was comforting to return to the things that had kept her going when she was the kind of teenager boys didn't notice and girls laughed at.
She never let anything beyond kissing happen with Mark. A kiss seemed potentially excusable, but sleeping with him would be unforgivable. She tried to make plans with Derek, for dinner at expensive restaurants, for romantic nights in, for anything more than falling asleep after too-long days and kissing each other purely out of habit in the mornings. She tried to make things work with her husband.
But then there was the night where he was supposed to come home and didn't, staying late at the hospital yet again even though she knew that it wasn't a real emergency, just a surgery he couldn't stay away from, and she stared at the wall and thought about how she was somehow the only one in their relationship trying to be both successfully married and a successful surgeon, and how empty the bed felt.
She wasn't going to call him. She couldn't.
In her dream she was in an unfamiliar hospital and when she pushed the door to the stairwell open she saw her husband with another woman. She turned away before either of them noticed, before she had a chance to register any important details. Was he still wearing his wedding ring? She had no idea. But he looked so close to how he looked now, his hair a little longer but his face nearly a twin to the face she usually – no, only sometimes, now – woke up to.
It was still dark when she opened her eyes, not even midnight yet. Maybe it was just a dream. Maybe it wasn't actually going to happen. Maybe she wanted to believe in it so that she'd have an excuse.
Maybe it really, really hurt, and her husband wasn't even at home to comfort her and reassure her.
It took Mark less than twenty minutes to get there.
She only saw how it all fit together afterwards, after Derek found out, after he left. Part of her kept hoping for another dream, something to tell her what she should do next. Somewhere out there a future Addison had already chosen between Derek and Mark, and she just needed to know which choice had been made. Which path she needed to follow.
But the only dreams that came were ordinary dreams, the kind filled with things that made no sense in the morning, the kind she knew for sure weren't real.
She told herself she was looking for an easy way out, that believing in her vivid dreams was just a way of avoiding the complicated situation she was in, and stayed with Mark because he asked her to, and because Richard Webber had called her to let her know Derek was in Seattle. She had already read the article in the newspaper about his appointment there, but she was grateful to Richard for calling.
Derek hadn't felt that a wife who cheated on her husband had the right to know where the husband was going. For all she'd known, he could have left the country. Seattle was nearly far enough away for it to feel like that.
Once, she considered telling Mark about the dreams, but she realised that the man who rolled his eyes when she passed out hot cocoa in the hospital would have her sitting in front of a psychiatrist within minutes if she told him something like that.
Some days she thought maybe she was just crazy. On the bad days – like her wedding anniversary – she was sure of it, and worried about her ability to do her job.
When Richard called again, needing her help on a particular case, she almost laughed, because it was a bad day and she couldn't see how anyone who believed in fucking time travel could be the kind of skilled surgeon that was worth flying across the country for a single case. But she didn't laugh, because she was still Dr. Montgomery Shepherd and that meant being professional and cool and collected. Good air in, bad air out, and she jotted down some notes and prepared to make the necessary arrangements.
She spent the flight thinking about Mark, about Derek, about that woman. If she'd already seen the stairways at Seattle Grace, if that woman was there – it had to mean something. If she had seen something real, then she was somehow justified in sleeping with Mark. If she had seen something real, then there was no need to take some time off from her job and get some psychiatrist to medicate her into normality.
When she arrived at the hospital, she realised she didn't need to see the stairways, because Derek was there and he'd grown his hair, and the woman with him was – the woman who'd been sleeping with her husband.
She only realised later that she wasn't supposed to know that. For all she knew, they could have been just friends, even though Derek looked at her as though he was in love with her. She wasn't supposed to have seen anything that indicated there was something going on between Derek and this woman.
Addison also realised that no one concerned themselves with details like who-told-who when it was all painfully true. And yet the seventeen-year-old geek inside her reminded her harshly that if it hadn't been true, if it hadn't been true yet, she would have changed the way things were supposed to go. Her arrival could have been the cause of the stairwell scene she'd been privy to instead of happening afterwards. Why hadn't she thought of that? Why did she only consider these things too late?
But it was difficult contemplating the logistics of something that wasn't even supposed to exist when she was trying to piece her marriage back together.
It surprised her when he didn't sign the divorce papers. She thought he would. From the way he kissed that woman, that Meredith, and from the way he looked at her, she thought she was going to be on a plane back to New York, back to Mark. Instead she found herself calling Mark and asking if he could pack up a few of her things for her, to be sent to her new address.
It surprised her when Mark showed up in Seattle. It felt like the sort of thing she should have known about, and the fact that she hadn't seen it happen, hadn't seen something between them happen, tipped the balance in Derek's favour.
Addison knew her logic was faulty, but it was something to cling to. Like cocoa on especially harrowing days or her red underwear on days she'd be getting important news, it gave her some kind of control over her life. It gave her direction. There was no proof that the moments she saw were the important or pivotal ones, but she wanted to believe they were.
She hadn't seen her husband and Meredith at the prom. That had to mean nothing had happened, didn't it?
She told herself this immediately afterwards, chanted it to herself as a mantra that night so that she had some chance of sleeping. She kept telling herself that the following day, and it wasn't until one of the interns – Dr. Yang, of all people – pointed out, awkwardly, that she was crying, that Addison realised her cheeks were wet and that at some point her body had given up believing what her mind was only now letting go of.
Something had happened. It had happened without her seeing it, but it had happened.
She no longer wondered whether she was crazy. She just wondered if she would ever stop hurting. If Derek had to be quite so obvious about his relationship with Meredith. If everyone would stop talking about it, pitying her. She was the best damn neonatal surgeon on the west coast and all anyone was whispering about was her love life. How she'd given up her life in New York, which included a very handsome plastic surgeon, to live in a trailer with someone who just couldn't keep his hands off his beloved intern girlfriend.
If it hadn't been for her contract, tying her to Seattle Grace for another eighteen months, she would have left. But she had made a commitment to Richard, and she had a job to do, so she found an apartment and spent her next day off rearranging the furniture and unpacking her things.
It took her a while before she could sleep properly in the apartment. It wasn't yet home, and she wasn't yet used to sleeping alone again. She took up meditation for the third time in five years and actually stuck with it, and it helped, a little.
She was meditating, not sleeping, when it happened. She was lying on her bed and then suddenly she was not. She was lying on an empty bed in a room in Seattle Grace, and she was wearing her pyjamas.
Even on the worst of her worst days, Addison would not have wandered into work wearing pajamas. She looked at them and decided they could pass for casual attire, the kind of clothing someone would wear for yoga or jogging or something.
She wondered, and she couldn't believe she was wondering it, but she was, if her future-self was around somewhere. If her future-self remembered this, and knew to arrive with more appropriate clothes.
It was too real for her to be dreaming it. She was touching the things in the room, and they were there, as solid as she was. As she walked around, her bare feet on the floor grew cold.
"Hey."
Addison knew the voice, but not the tone. It was Meredith, but a happy Meredith, a teasing seductive Meredith. Maybe Derek knew this Meredith, but she was a stranger to Addison. That, more than anything else, convinced her this was real.
It took her a moment to adjust, which made Meredith tilt her head and ask, "Is everything okay?" Her hand reached out to push a stray bit of hair out of Addison's face, casually intimate.
"Yeah," Addison said. "Everything's fine." It was easy to smile, because it had been so long since anyone had touched her that even that was a welcome gesture.
And then Meredith was kissing her, and Addison kissed her back without thinking about it, because it seemed like the natural response, and Meredith's hands were reaching underneath the pajama top and cupping her breasts, and she had definitely done that before because her fingers were moving like someone who had mapped out Addison's body thoroughly.
Her entire body, Addison realised, and oh fuck it had been a long time since anyone touched her in that way. Since anyone had desired her so badly that they were actually doing this in a hospital. When they were supposed to be working.
Her brain was still having a little trouble processing this when Meredith's pager went off. Addison helped her find her bra, and then she was gone, and Addison was left in the dark room alone, with a grin so wide she thought it was probably going to hurt in the morning, the way it always did when muscles that hadn't been used in too long were finally activated.
She sank down onto the floor, and landed on her own bed.
Her fingers were Meredith-scented and her feet were colder than they should have been if she'd been in her apartment the whole time, and yes, it was crazy, but it had happened.
The next day at work, she looked at Meredith with new eyes. She had critically assessed Meredith's attractiveness before, but always in terms of what Derek liked, what appealed to him.
There was something about having the knowledge of what it was like to be with Meredith Grey that made it difficult to resent her, or envy her. The night before, Meredith had been hers. Not Derek's. Not Finn's. Meredith had been Addison's.
And Addison had been wanted. How was she supposed to hate the woman who wanted her like that?
So she watched Meredith to see if she could find traces of the seductive Meredith she knew existed. It turned into a crush before she realised it. One day she was searching for the smile that she knew Meredith reserved for those she was attracted to, and it was because she wanted to see it rather than because she was simply curious.
When Meredith and Derek broke up, and the whole hospital was talking about it, Addison found herself feeling unhappily pleased about it, which didn't surprise her, but because of her and not him, which did.
When Derek tried to talk to her, she held up the hand she no longer wore a ring on, and stopped him. He looked at her with those eyes and for a moment she almost considered saying yes, but she stopped herself. Derek didn't want her in the way that she needed to be wanted, and someday Meredith Grey would, and Addison deserved to be wanted.
She thought about the women on the covers of those novels and wondered if her adolescent interest had faded slightly because it had just been one of those teenage phases or because she'd known from the age of seventeen that she was going to marry that man with the incredible eyes. She wondered if she would ever be attracted to anyone spontaneously, or if she needed to know, before, that something would happen.
She wondered whether she was buying Meredith a drink because she felt sorry for her, being the one everyone was talking about again, or because she suspected that might be how it began.
She wondered if having been there, if knowing, was going to change things. If she was going to make some wrong move and cause it not to happen. She'd never been nervous like that before, and she wondered when wanting Meredith because Meredith wanted her had turned into simply wanting Meredith.
"Hey," Meredith said, and Addison was startled for a moment because it was that tone, but all that followed was, "Thanks for the drink."
Addison lifted her own glass to her lips. "You're welcome."
The next night, Meredith returned the favour. They were talking about surgeries, not Derek, not hospital gossip, when Meredith leaned over – so close – and said, "They're watching us, you know."
Addison knew better than to look right away. She waited a moment, and then casually glanced around the bar, locating the night's hospital contingent.
"Are we worth watching?" Addison asked, even though she knew the answer.
Meredith smiled at her. It wasn't quite that smile, but it was close. "We're not supposed to be this civilised to one another. We're not supposed to be sitting here together and not scratching each other's eyes out."
"Would you rather be scratching my eyes out?" Addison asked, raising an eyebrow.
"I think we're okay," Meredith nodded, and ordered another round.
They were friends first. That was how it happened.
Addison thought that maybe there was something more, another layer, but she couldn't be sure whether that was a realistic reading or whether it was her own knowledge of what was to come that made her believe that. When Meredith looked at her in a certain way, Addison couldn't tell whether Meredith was considering her as something potential, or whether she was just contemplating the things – the man – they had in common once upon a time. For all she knew, Meredith could be examining her eyebrows or counting up the signs of age on her face.
The first time Meredith kissed her, she wasn't expecting it and yet she was.
Addison had a dinner party to mark a year in her apartment. At least, it was meant to be for the year, but her schedule was overflowing, and it wasn't until thirteen and a half months after moving in to her new apartment that she had several of the doctors over for dinner.
She hadn't been sure whether or not to invite Derek, but he had a surgery scheduled that night so it didn't matter, anyway. She suspected this was Richard's doing, and squeezed his arm in gratitude as she greeted him and Adele.
Meredith stayed after everyone else had left, to help clean up.
"You don't have to do that," Addison said as they gathered up plates.
"I want to," Meredith said, and a moment later they almost collided at the door of the kitchen, Addison on her way out to collect the rest of the dishes and Meredith bringing wine glasses in, and Meredith kissed her.
It was so simple, once it had happened. One kiss followed another, and Meredith set down the wine glasses and Addison guided her towards the bedroom, and somehow they had lost half their clothes to the floor by the time they reached the bed.
It was not new, and yet it was. It was familiar but unfamiliar, a first time except it wasn't really.
Addison was nervous because it was Meredith, and calm because it was Meredith.
And then there was no room in her head for coherent thought.
They fit together in the bed easily, falling asleep almost in sync, as though it was an old custom and not something entirely new.
The inevitability of it didn't stop Addison from beaming constantly. Between that and the way Meredith was smiling, the hospital as one concluded that Derek was secretly involved with both of them again, and the nurses shook their heads at how foolish those women were not to realise what that man was doing to them.
The trick to not being caught was to always lock the door, if possible, and to always answer pages right away. Three weeks after the first time, Addison tried to count up the number of rooms in the hospital they'd visited and realised that she'd already lost track.
It surprised her that they kept it up. The weeks went by, and they still whispered to each other as they passed by in the hallways, still made secret plans.
It was familiar but not monotonous, a routine without really being a routine.
One day, five minutes before she had planned to slip away to a vacant room at the end of the hall, she was called into surgery, without time to contact Meredith and cancel their plans. It would be up on the board. She forced herself to concentrate on her work and the scalpel in her hand.
When Addison ran into her later, her mouth was open to apologise for not having made it, but then Meredith was glowing in that familiar way and Addison closed her mouth and tried to remember if Derek had been in surgery all day or if he might have had time to make an appearance in an empty room.
She wondered if she could stand it, being left again.
"You changed your clothes," Meredith said, and Addison looked at her in surprise, and then she understood, and grinned.
She was past the point she knew anything about now, but it didn't seem so important anymore. The surprises would come anyway, and it was possible, she knew, to be sure of someone even without seeing it.
She was sure of Meredith, and that surprised her, and yet it didn't.