All I Want For Christmas -- Derek and Addison

He knew something was wrong the second he walked into the trailer.  Things were off... too quiet, too solemn.

She hadn't left; and even after all the times he might have wished she would, he was relieved to see the stack of shoe boxes on her side of the bed and her extra pair of glasses on the nightstand.  But something was still wrong, even if he couldn't put his finger on exactly what it was.

When he heard a car drive up and the engine turn off, he assumed his mind had been running away with him and that Addison had just gone out to do some errands or some last-minute shopping... or she'd been circling their property trying to decide how to come in and deal with him now that he'd dropped his bombshell on her at Joe's the night before.

"I fell in love with her."

He hadn't gone into the bar planning to say that to his wife.  In fact, he'd been dodging her inquiries about "what was wrong" all day in the hopes of avoiding the topic of what exactly it was that was bothering him.

It was only later, after he'd said it, after that look had crossed her face, that he shook his head and realized he'd picked a hell of a time to start being honest about his feelings.  Not once in New York had he ever said "I'm unhappy" or "this isn't working" or "do you really think this is who we're supposed to be?"  And while that didn't excuse her affair, he sure as hell had to start facing up to the fact that she hadn't jumped into bed with Mark without trying like hell for months on end to get him to talk to her, and every time he'd just walked away.

But he'd wounded her with his words, and his statement that his intention wasn't to hurt her didn't matter much in the wake of just how much pain that short, ridiculously complicated statement had caused.

In retrospect, he could've added that he'd stayed with her because he still loved her, too, regardless of his feelings for Meredith.  But he thought somehow that she knew that, and so the words just hadn't come.  He'd told himself repeatedly, if she didn't know that, why was she putting herself through this?  Because it was agony; he'd admit to anyone who asked.  Their marriage was so broken at this point, that every step to try and put it back together actually caused physical pain.  But they both kept taking the steps.  That had to mean something, didn't it?

The trailer door squeaked open, pulling him out of his head, and Derek had looked up fully expecting to say, "It's Christmas.  Let's just enjoy our day and leave everything else until tomorrow."  Except it wasn't Addison standing there inside the door, looking at him with those eyes that said, "are you ever going to forgive me?"

Meredith was standing there instead.

"Mer... um... what are you doing here?"

"I got your message."

He felt his brow furrow as he walked toward her.

"Message?"

"That you wanted to talk.  I need to get back to the house, but I told them I had a quick errand to do, so..."

He looked at her with complete confusion.  He had not left Meredith any message, and he surely wouldn't have asked her to come here if he had.  The last thing he needed after yesterday was for Addison to...

And then it all made sense.  He shook his head and started toward the door.

"Meredith, I'm sorry.  I... I have to go find Addison.  You should just go home."

She called after him, wanting to know why he'd called, what he wanted, but Derek walked on, heading for the Range Rover and grabbing his cell phone from his pocket as he started the engine.

"Richard, do you know where she is?"

His boss sighed on the other end of the line.  "She said she was going home to get some things from New York and that she'd be back in a few days.  I thought you knew.  It sounded like... maybe you two had decided something."

Derek shook his head as he guided the Rover onto the road.

"Okay, I'm heading to the airport to see if I can stop her.  Do me a favor?  If she calls, tell her I said not to leave."

Richard agreed, though he was clearly frustrated at the lack of details coming his way.  Derek hung up the phone and focused on navigating through the insane traffic that was trying to flow from all directions into the airport entrance.  But a noise ripped through the air... a sound of metal screaming in protest at how it was being torn apart, of shattering and clattering and slamming pieces of something followed by a loud roar.  And then a cloud of black smoke rose up toward the back of the airport, and Derek felt his stomach turn over.

He pulled to the side of the road quickly, and as a score of emergency vehicles rolled toward him, he caught a cop's attention and offered his help treating anyone who was hurt.  As they filed in behind the other black and white's and ambulances, the cop told Derek the report was that one plane had skidded off the runway and crashed into another with massive casualties.  The last thing he did before racing out to the command center already being set up on scene was to call Richard and tell him to get the burn and trauma units on full alert.

There were so many faces that raced by him in the next few hours, Derek couldn't even fathom how he could remember them, but he did.  Andrea and the burns on her face and back, Wilson and the intracranial pressure he'd had to relieve right there on scene, Jake, the six year old whose arm he'd put into a splint to stabilize the compound fracture he'd sustained at the wrist... so many of them, and then there were the ones he couldn't help, that he watched get loaded into body bags as some other medical professional pronounced them and moved on.

The first plane had split the second in half on impact.  Derek knew the back end of that second plane had been the scene of more than half the deaths in the crash, though he had no clue why.  The science of that kind of disaster wasn't what he did.  He was too focused on doing what he could to put the broken bodies back together, at least temporarily, until his colleagues at Seattle Grace could finish the job.

He knew that there were some patients who'd be waiting for his hands to lead the way in that effort, and so Derek realized he'd have to head to the hospital soon.  He walked over to the command center, and as he did, he realized how much time had gone by since he'd first set out to find his wife.  Addison was probably halfway to New York by now or maybe even there already.  He'd never even known if he could catch her or what he was going to do if it turned out she'd already taken off before he could find her.  She was probably long since there, gone as soon as he'd left the trailer that morning, maybe even already at the brownstone brooding, trying not to fall apart as she thought about the last time they'd been there together.

"Chief," he said as he approached the fire chief who was running the scene.  "I'm gonna have to get to the hospital and see how many surgeries they need me for."

The chief nodded and glanced over at the lieutenant standing next to him.

"Make sure we sign the doctor out.  And it's doctor?"

"Shepherd," he replied, and the chief's face clouded with confusion.

"I thought Dr. Shepherd was a woman?"

His lieutenant quickly shook his head.  "There is a Dr. Shepherd who's a woman helping at other triage site.  But this is Dr. Shepherd, too.  Derek, right?"

But Derek had stopped listening, his stomach knotting up so badly it was almost painful.

"My wife?  Is that my wife you're talking about?"

The lieutenant glanced down at his list.

"Addison Shepherd?  She was on one of the planes, and she offered to help with--"

"She was on one of those planes?!" Derek shouted, his shock so deep that he felt sick and dizzy.

"That's your wife son?"

The chief's question registered in his mind even if it took him a moment to nod in response.

"Lieutenant."

The next thing Derek knew, the young lieutenant was pulling him by the arm toward the second triage site on the other side of the plane that had skidded off its runway.  Derek had been so busy at the other site, he'd never made it over here until now, and he saw that there were a lot more children in this group, probably because there had been more families on board.

When his guide pointed to the far corner, Derek looked that direction. She was checking vitals on a baby, her red hair carelessly twisted into a haphazard knot to keep it out of her face, and she looked like she'd been dragged behind something... her dress was torn, and he could see scrapes on her arms and legs, but somehow she was up and moving and being exactly the amazing doctor she'd been born to be.

His feet started moving toward her as he only now started to understand what he was really seeing.  Addison... alive.  Addison walking and talking and alive when she could've been... and he wouldn't have even known.  He could've been at the trailer talking to Meredith with no clue that his wife had been on a plane that had spun out of control, skidding across the asphalt that was supposed to be its route into the air, crashing into a second plane.

He thought of the broken bodies he'd seen... of the burned ones... of the pain he'd tried to lessen in patient after patient as they streamed off the planes.  And she could've been one of them.  Addison could be gone... and she'd have died thinking about the last thing he'd said to her.

"I fell in love with her."

"Addie."

Derek's throat ached as the single word came forth, and she looked up from the worried, anxious woman she'd been speaking to, he assumed the baby's mother, so distracted she didn't seem to recognize his voice.  When her eyes fell on him, though, she froze for a moment, so stunned to see him that she shook her head and blinked her eyes.

"Derek?"

He pulled her into him, his arms wrapping around her quickly and tightly.  She returned the embrace, though tentatively, and he pulled back after he reassured himself that letting her go wouldn't make her disappear, and then without saying a word, he pulled her by the hand toward the edge of the triage area, away from the pain and the fear and the noise.

"What are you--"

He stopped and turned back, cutting off her words.

"I said I fell in love with her.  I didn't say I was going back to her."

She sighed and lowered her eyes.

"It's what you want."

He drew in a deep breath and released it slowly, just looking at her, unsure what to say.  Then his right hand reached out and began to gently glance over the small wounds he could see so much better now that he was this close to her.  There were scrapes on her face, too, on the same side as the ones on her arms and legs.  And only now could he see the deep bruise on her right forearm.  His fingers traced over it.

"The whole side of the plane where I was just... it crinkled in like a paper fan.  I was lucky, though.  The man sitting behind me, he..."

Her voice broke and Derek lifted his eyes back to hers.

"When I realized what you'd done, that you'd left to let me spend Christmas with Meredith... all I wanted was to find you and tell you that I didn't want you to go."

She looked at him a little disbelieving, her eyes narrowed.

"You came here to stop me from leaving?"

"I said I fell in love with her, Addison.  I never said I had stopped loving you."

The tears pooling against her lower lids were the first sign, and Derek took a step closer to her, ready for what was coming.  Because even if he'd found her waiting at the gate and said those words to her, he knew she'd have been stunned to hear them, her emotions sent into overdrive.  But today... today she had been willing to give him up... and she had been inches away from death... and now she was standing here with him and he had just said the one thing he'd been unable to say in all the weeks and months she'd been fighting to win him back.

So when all of it collapsed in on her, he was there, his arms strong enough to hold her up as the weight of everything threatened to pull her under.  And when she wrapped her arms around him again, this time holding on for dear life, Derek held her back just as tightly, reminded of how it felt to never want to let go.