Author's Note: New project alert! Starting a new story when I have two massive WIPs ongoing - crazy, or crazier? But this is a chance for my Addek heart to get out some feels and work out some drabbles that end up helping me with the longer stuff. So, time to flip the script. Each chapter of this story will be a standalone one-shot expanding on a moment either during or directly after a particular episode when things could have gone the other way for Addison and Derek. There are so, so many times they could have just talked and made progress! Or run into each other at opportune moments and ... you get the idea. Ultimately, the goal of each one will be to figure out how they could have flipped a moment of the script toward true reconciliation.

Season 2 makes the most sense to me to explore, especially in terms of finally having important conversations, but I'm open to 3, 4, and even 5, depending on what people are interested in reading. Perspectives/narrators will vary, but all will be Addek. So … are you interested in reading?

(The tone of this first piece is inspired by Seema's brilliant Five Ways Derek Redeems Himself, one of the first fics I ever read. I'm not sure if Seema is still out there and writing, but … yeah. She rocks.)

First one-shot is inspired by the final montage in season 2, episode 11. Others may be somewhat longer, this one is brief. Here goes:

Treatment
(2.11, "Owner of a Lonely Heart")

"I think Izzie Stevens hates me."

They're the first words she's spoken, other than I'm lonely, Derek, since she entered the gallery. A part of wonders if she even said the lonely thing out loud. Sometimes she thinks the loneliness just seeps from her pores, announcing itself to the world so loudly that it doesn't need to be verbalized. In Seattle, she's an open wound.

"Stevens …" Derek looks like he's trying to place her. She couldn't say he looks interested, exactly, but he doesn't stand up and walk away, so that's something.

It's something in Seattle, anyway.

Addison waits for his nod of recognition, then continues. "She did some excellent work with Dorie Russell and her girls, but … then I, uh, I put her in charge of one of the quints overnight and ... let her think she killed the baby."

He glances sideways at her. "Richard's bright idea?"

"Yeah, well." She looks down at her hands. "He thought it worked on me, when I was an intern."

Moments pass in silence; she reaches for another sunflower seed, and their fingers brush when she pulls it from the bag.

"Did it?" Derek asks. "Work on you, I mean."

"I don't know." She leans back a little in the chair. She remembers the baby: Jared. Jared Hartley. His twin brother, Jeremy, survived, but every time she saw that small body breathing in the NICU after that night, she felt an ache in her stomach instead of the normal rush of tenderness. Does Derek remember the morning after, she wonders? She was a mess, a heap of exhausted tears; Derek – he wasn't her husband yet, not even her fiancé, just her – boyfriend – folded her up with him in an on-call room, not talking because she couldn't hear anything, just holding her. They were so young then. Naïve. She didn't speak to Richard for almost a year.

And now he's one of the only people in this town who speaks to her at all.

Did Richard's lesson work? Is she different now? She's older, certainly. Less naïve. She's lost patients, far more than her childish intern self could have thought possible. Then, she thought she could save everyone. Even the ones other people thought were too far gone.

"I don't know," she admits. She glances at her husband, feels the space between them even as they sit side by side, and turns the question back to him. "Do you think I still get too attached?"

"You didn't get too attached to our wedding vows."

It stings, but she takes it. It more than stings, actually, knowing that her tender underbelly is just another surface for him to kick these days. Even if he deserves to hurt her, even if she deserves to be hurt, it still stings. A part of her is surprised he can still hurt her so quickly, so deeply, with just a few words.

And then another part of her isn't surprised at all.

She doesn't look up at him again until she's steadied her face and blinked back the tears that were threatening to spill.

"I'm sorry," he says abruptly. "That was a cheap shot."

Now that surprises her. But she just nods quickly, hoping they can drop this before tears actually fall.

"Addison…"

"I still get attached," she says, before he can say anything more, willing her voice not to tremble; his sounded almost gentle and she's afraid she won't be able to handle what he's planning to say. "I still hang on, I … get involved, but …well." She looks down at her hands again. "I guess I don't like giving up too easily."

"No." Derek holds out the bag of sunflower seeds and she takes another. "You never did like giving up."

She waits for another dig, for him to add except when you gave up on our marriage or even you gave it up to Mark pretty easily, but it doesn't come. He's just sitting next to her quietly.

"Sometimes I do need help," she begins tentatively after a few long moments of silence, "knowing when it's time to stop treatment, to let go of a ... patient." She forces herself to breathe, to rely on medical metaphor because she's too frightened to say the actual words. He deserves an out, doesn't he? After what she did to him, he deserves it.

But that doesn't mean she wants him to take it. Her heart flutters slightly when he glances at her. Don't cry, she wills herself, no matter what he says, not here. Wait until you're home ... wherever that is.

"Doctors will always have different opinions on the appropriate time to stop treatment," Derek says slowly, like he's lecturing around a patient's bedside.

"Right." She leans back in her seat. It's no more than what they both learned as interns; she was wrong to read more into the moment.

He stands up, then, brushing crumbs from his scrubs, and indicates the door with his chin. "I have post-ops."

She nods.

"Are you…"

"I think I'll stay here." If she was lonely before, staring into an empty OR can only help, right? The room on display is as empty as she feels: it's a marker, a place where something happened, notable for what its absence represents. Like the strip of whiter skin on the fourth finger of her husband's bare left hand.

Truthfully, she's not sure she can walk outside with him right now, into the glaring fluorescence of the hallway, where the crush of people makes her feel even more alone.

He starts to swing the door open, then leans back, half in and half out of the gallery.

"Addie…"

She doesn't look up. "Yeah?"

"It's not time yet. To, uh, to stop ... treatment."

She feels the beginning of a smile, before she can stop it, maybe even a flicker of hope, as she raises her eyes to meet his. "It's not?"

"It's not," Derek echoes, and as the door swings shut behind him the rest of the smile spreads across her face.

My babies! They were so young in this episode. (Insert Adele singing: "We could have had it aaaaaaall...") So, what do you think? I want to continue this project if people are interested in reading it! Any particular episodes or moments you're interested in flipping for this story? Let me know, and thank you, as always!