Not mine. K+/PG. Post-3x18. Addison and Alex grapple with professional aspirations and personal yearnings. Now ongoing. Mostly Addison/Alex with references to Addison/Mark and Addison/Derek.

Chapter One. "A Quarter of an Inch." Alex seeks professional reassurance from his former mentor; Addison reflects on a trying day.

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"I was just trying to look out for her."

Addison indulged in a brief, barely-audible sigh before peering up from her chart at an edgy and defensively-posed Dr. Karev. She'd perched on a gurney in a quiet hallway of the psych floor in precisely the hopes of avoiding people she knew. People like him. It had been a long, dull day, filled with paperwork, uncooperative patients, and personal tension. To make matters even better, she'd been assisted on the first two in sulky silence by her intern, Yang, whom the virulent Seattle Grace rumor mill credited with having had a day even worse than her own. Now there was a match she wouldn't have predicted. She could understand the thing with Burke, because, well, in addition to his surgical prowess, Preston was a rather fine specimen of a man. He could be quite charming at times. Derek, she knew, had found him stand-offish at first, but she had always found his manner towards herself to be pleasant and warm. But Yang and Colin Marlow? That would be like her and Richard engaging in….

Ugh. Addison swiftly slammed the door on that nauseating vision. Not that Richard was ugly, by any means--but the man had been a surrogate father to her for nearly twelve years. (Which made today's dressing-down from him sting, more than a little.) In any event, she couldn't comprehend the attraction, and she'd done her best that day to keep Yang running around, her churlish energy occupied at a safe distance from Addison's own set of irritating entanglements. Today, really, there was just one entanglement. Mark. Whose breezy self-assurance in what she considered to be grave matters of the heart at once aggravated and entranced her. And whose blatant disregard for her professional opinion infuriated her, period.

With Derek, no matter the state of their personal relations, she was always assured of his professional respect. Whether it was the product of love or the proprietor's pride in the prowess of a favored race horse, he'd always understood that she was damned good at her job. To be sure, her tendency to attach herself to patients infuriated him at times, but it was only, she knew, because he sensed his weakness for that side of her. There wasn't much of the damsel-in-distress about Addison Montgomery, but cooing over a four-inch fighter in the NICU, she acquired an air of incipient heartbreak that drew Derek to her like a fly to honey. His exorbitant ego had always pegged him as the only man capable of assuaging her grief. She was ashamed to admit now, in the mordant waste land of their "fairytale" marriage, that he had once been right.

Just as she was ashamed, today, of turning to him in the argument with Mark. Because Mark was right—he was no longer her husband, it wasn't his patient, and she shouldn't have brought him into it. But the small, fierce corner of her psyche, the one that had sent her leaping out of her seat to follow him at his first civil, post-divorce word, the one that had made soap necessary in the removal of her rings—that part had seen a chance for "Addison and Derek" to reunite for a second, in however vitiated a form, and seized it. Addison despised that side of herself, and such moments of indulgence were usually succeeded by a vicious renouncement of all things "Derek."

It was just such a moment that had landed her in her present predicament.

"I was just trying to look out for her. Jane Doe, you know. I didn't realize," muttered the intern before her, "I just… she and the baby, they're going to be okay, right?" Addison forced her facial muscles to relax, to un-knit the fold between her brows. The teaching instinct was insuppressible with her. Right now, looking at the half-defiant, half-fearful face of this boy (for he was still a boy, really), she was not the aging reject of a youthful Lothario. She was his mentor. It was as such that she responded.

"It was not your responsibility to realize anything. It was my responsibility and Dr. Sloan's to advise the patient of the best course of action." She wondered if he was still smarting from having been yelled at, earlier. Her tone had been a little harsh, perhaps, but the order had been reasonable, and he'd certainly had worse from her in their time together. She wouldn't apologize.

"It's just that, well, she asked me—the patient, I mean—she asked if, you know, if the baby would be okay. And I said we'd be watching the fetus closely. But it was only because I knew that you would fix it, if anything bad happened, and I thought her eyesight was—"

"Karev," she cut him off before he could register the compliment he'd let slip and feel embarrassed by it. "The baby is fine. The patient is fine. Mark Sloan has no respect for my specialty, and that's a problem, but it's his problem to deal with, not yours." And there it was. He was afraid, poor kid, of appearing to have picked sides. It was unlike him, this placating tone, and here again she'd failed in his professional guidance. Because he shouldn't have had to transfer the sense of being personally trapped—in the middle of the maelstrom that was her relationship with Mark, which was itself an escape from Derek, and from which she had attempted to escape in turn, by kissing Karev that night at Joe's—into a sense of professional failure. That was unfair. Everything about this situation—for her, Mark, and Karev—was unfair. Only Derek waltzed away with sanguine prospects and an unshaken faith in the healing power of True Love. But she had begun, of late, to suspect that his optimism was grounded in a shallowness of feeling. He grieved, for sure, but his grief was the self-congratulatory wallowing of Romantic-era poets and pre-pubescent boy-bands. No recent divorcé who really felt could be that happy all of the time.

But disgust with Derek and the natural desire to fling some self-satisfaction back at him were not good enough justifications for her pact with Mark. Why had she let it happen? She might have been faithful to him, physically, in their two brief months together, but she'd always known that he felt more for her than she did for him. It was a sad fate, to be a compulsive manwhore. He was cursed with the capacity for true feeling without the ability to sustain its outward appearance. He had twenty years of habit with which to grapple, and no one to support the quest by believing he could make it. Who was she to deplore his lack of respect for her, professionally? She didn't respect him personally, and that was far worse. She'd even held him up, in her mind and out loud, as an example of what not to become, the endpoint to avoid. She'd told Karev she wanted to protect him from Mark's influence.

Ah, Karev. The relief of knowing she didn't blame him—that he still had her respect, even affection?—was visible in the lines of his shoulders. She had made him feel better. Her approval meant that much. This much, at least, she could still do. Now he replied.

"He shouldn't be taking it out on you at work." Suddenly he was right there, in her personal space, all scrubs and flesh and sympathy hovering on the outskirts of her field of vision through her now-downcast eyes. She'd have to remember to start wearing a camisole under this dress. Not that Addison wasn't comfortable with a little cleavage at work, but at this moment, avoiding his eyes, it was all she could see and all she imagined he was seeing, too. Which would be fine, if this was before the Incident in the Supply Closet and if she hadn't been hiding for a week before that like the guilty harlot she sometimes believed herself to be. Was this impotent preoccupation with sex a sign of things to come? In twenty years would she be wandering this psych ward with a walker, hobbling after every penis in sight, wailing: "Who's next? I am lonely and empty inside…"?

"Whatever it is," he continued, and she imagined she could feel the heat of his hand hovering near hers, "that he wants from you, if he's not getting it, it's his fault. He's an ass. And if you've finally figured that out, he has no right to take it out on you professionally." Well. There he was, the Karev of intentional vanilla lattes, the Alex she'd killed (he'd killed) in her mind that day in the supply closet, a fully mortifying ten minutes after he'd departed and left her knee-deep in the wreckage of her self-esteem. Here he was, now, long past her declarations to Mark about their incompatibility and after she'd managed to enmesh herself once more in the web of "Mark and Addison and Derek." Because Mark would always come with a helping of Derek, even in New York before, even now with Derek blissfully emancipated from them, off in his "Meredith and Derek" world. They could not move on. He was always with them.

But Karev was not connected to the triangle (quadrangle?) of despair. His ties to Mark were professional, and Addison was starting to hope that those, too, were more tenuous than he'd admitted. He might have failed his boards—Richard had let it slip during one of their dumped-spouse pity parties, in a moment when they were pretending they weren't actually that self-absorbed—but he'd applied himself, in the past, to cases in neonatal, and when he had the results had been phenomenal. Sure, he'd been diligent with dry-cleaning, but she hadn't seen that spark of intellectual fervor in his eyes once in the time since he'd left her for Mark.

Left her for Mark. As if he was their plaything and they were two large cats at play, passing him back and forth between their paws. The boy she'd condescended to put at ease was gone; in his place was the wrestler whose black tank top had sent a rush of blood to her head that was independent of her oxygen mask.

"Dr. Sloan and I," she managed to enunciate (had he heard about their pact?), "are coworkers, that's all." If it wasn't true it should be, and as soon as her breathing steadied and she could look people in the eye again, Addison would figure out how to make it so. "It was unprofessional of us both to air our differences in the hallway." There. Turn it into a teaching moment, that's the ticket.

Feeling bolder, she lifted her eyes to meet his. A clear mistake. She caught the slight, quickly-suppressed smirk that responded, in his eyes, to the obvious awakened interest in hers. Chagrined, she rose to the challenge: stiffening her frame, narrowing her eyes, and leaning in close enough to smell his breath. "Just coworkers, Karev. Just like you and I."

He swallowed, and she watched with fascination as the tendons in his neck undulated around his Adam's apple. A faint growth of stubble lined the underside of his jaw, and her surgeon's fingers itched to touch it with a curiosity almost scientific. What would its texture be, and what would his sensations be along the roots of those hairs as her fingers shifted them with a caress? A faint flush was spreading just behind his ears, and the sudden awareness of his arousal gave a fresh burst of intensity to her own. His gaze flickered to her lips, left slightly parted, and he seemed to gather his own resolve as he inched his mouth towards hers.

"Addison." The voice was sharp, low, and unmistakably petulant. At once she had all the personal space she could wish for, and more. Mark stood staring at her with a face of wounded virtue. Karev—that courage of mere moments ago now vanished into stale hospital air—had fled the scene.

"Mark." Her tone was impatient with a hint of involuntary guilt.

"A word, if you please." She held his gaze for a beat to emphasize her right of refusal, the necessity of making it a request. Then she followed him through the double doors to wherever he deemed fit.

It was only fair to leave a man the choice of a deathbed for his hopes.

End of Chapter One.

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A/N: the imagery with the walker & accompanying quote come courtesy of Kate Walsh's Square Off interview. I wish I was that funny.