DISCLAIMER: Grey's Anatomy and its characters are the property of Shonda Rhimes and ABC. No infringement intended.
AUTHOR'S NOTE: For theagonyofblank, who prompted with "when she laughs, it's like sunshine."
CHALLENGE: Written for the first International Day of Femslash.
ARCHIVING: Only with the permission of the author.
Cloudy With a Chance of Sunshine
By mysensitiveside
Addison didn't know what she was doing there.
Back in New York, it had seemed so clear. Mark was a mistake, obviously; she wanted Derek, her husband, and so she'd simply follow him to Seattle, prove that she loved him, and get him back.
Simple, right?
She hadn't counted on any goddamn interns getting in the way of her straightforward plan.
Goddamned Meredith Grey.
So here she was, stuck in Seattle, trying to make a square peg fit into a round hole. In theory, she had him. He had ended things with Meredith, and he and Addison were trying to make it work. Trying to forget the mounting betrayals.
Regardless, she couldn't help but be pessimistic about it all. She wasn't blind. She saw the way Derek and Meredith still looked at each other.
Plus, she and Derek had lost their spark. He was still as charming as ever -- McDreamy, they called him. It was a childish nickname, but pretty accurate, nonetheless. -- but something was missing. Trust, she supposed. That was a big one.
She missed New York. She missed Central Park in spring, shopping for shoes along Madison Ave, the view over the East River from her apartment, the coffee shop on the way to work. The fact that it didn't rain every other damn day.
Seattle was gray all the time. Seattle was cold. Seattle was, to be perfectly honest, simply the place where she happened to be living for now, with a husband who didn't love her anymore.
Addison felt like she should be more upset about this last fact, but somehow it was okay. She thought that maybe it was because she'd realized that she didn't love him as much as she'd thought either.
Still, she stayed. She couldn't quite let go of him. Not yet. And Seattle did have a few redeeming qualities, after all. There was a decent jazz scene; she liked walking by the Puget Sound, especially at night; she'd made some good friends; she'd actually gotten some really amazing surgeries, even though she'd always predicted that they'd be boring anywhere outside New York.
And then there were those interns. Well, it was really just the one intern that garnered her attention. No, that wasn't true. Two interns, even if the reasons behind the attention were very different in the two cases. Because there was Meredith, obviously. That pesky thorn in her side.
But there was another one that she'd noticed, and this one had been wholly unexpected. Intern #2 served to ease the pain that came with Intern #1, in a way. Because Intern #2 -- oh, who was she kidding, trying not to say the name, even just in her head... Because Izzie Stevens was another one of Seattle's perks.
The girl was smart. A good doctor, if sometimes too emotional. A good heart, though. And she didn't seem to hate Addison merely on principle, merely for existing. Not as much as the others, anyway. Or at the very least, she hid it better.
Still, even if things were awkward -- and how could they not be, when all of Izzie's friends thought that Addison was the devil? -- they worked well together.
And there was no denying that Izzie Stevens was attractive. They all were, the whole lot of interns, but Izzie in particular. Addison liked to watch her smile. Liked to hear her laugh. It may have been perpetually cloudy and spitting rain in Seattle, but when Izzie laughed, it was like sunshine. It had turned out to be Izzie Stevens, of all people, who could lighten Addison's day.
God, she sounded like a love-struck fool.
If things had been different, Addison thought that she and Stevens could have been friends. Who knows, maybe even more.
Addison lay awake in bed, waiting for her alarm to go off. She always found herself thinking too much in the morning, in that time between sleep and the start of her day.
Sighing, she glanced at the clock. She didn't have to be awake for another fifteen minutes, but she got up anyway. She turned, eyeing the beautiful man who continued to share his bed with her. He was her husband, but she was starting to resent him again. Him and his trailer in the middle of nowhere. Him and his intern.
Square peg in a round hole. That was Addison and Derek.
She padded barefoot into the kitchen, putting on a pot of coffee. She felt plenty awake at the moment, but it never took long for exhaustion to catch up with her.
She couldn't be tired until later. She had a surgery at 10. Izzie Stevens would be scrubbing in with her.
Addison had come to Seattle with the goal of having Derek with her when she left again. But plans changed.
Maybe, just maybe, she'd find a different reason to stay.
The End