THIS CHAPTER HAS BEEN LAST UPDATED ON MAY 31, 2020.
Author's Note:
Thanks to those who have left comments so far!
Here is another right away.
Hope you enjoy, I'd love to hear your feedback at the end :D
bobbiejelly
CHAPTER CONTENT WARNING:
SKIP TO THE TITLE CARD AT YOUR OWN RISK IF YOU DO NOT WANT SPOILERS.
Destruction of property. Possessiveness. Controlling Behavior.
Graphic descriptions of domestic violence.
*Consensual straight sex.
While the sex between Addison and the AU-Abusive Derek Shepherd will be 'consensual', I recognize there is a limit to how 'consensual' sex can be in an abusive relationship. I guess what I'm trying to say is that I'm not writing about sexual abuse and/or rape, per se, Addison asks him for sex, or he does and she wants him, and it's an unhealthy dynamic because of what he does and the circumstances, but in this AU I guess I'm not writing that he's forcing himself upon her while she is saying no. That's where I draw my line in what I am comfortable with. This has been altered from my previous content warning, upon the guidance of reader feedback - thanks! Is it sexual abuse and/rape? Yes. It has been brought to my attention that one of the scenes at the end of this chapter falls under the category of non-consensual sex/rape or at the very least, dubious consent.
I have altered the ratings on this to be 'creator chose not to use archive warnings,' because I feel that it's a tossup; all of these content warnings I feel are necessary, but I also feel like I'm giving everything away before it happens. Please let me know in the comments how you feel about these before-chapter preambles. Do you read them? Do they take away from your surprise? Do you value them? Do they help you out at all, or do you think they might? Do you think that they are adequate? Let me know, thank-you so much, dear readers.
bobbiejelly
Love The Way You Lie
Derek Shepherd, your husband, hits you- but you stayed until you couldn't stand up anymore. Your best friend Mark Sloan helped you leave him and you two had some adulterous sex. When you see Derek again in Seattle with another woman, all you want is to save her from him. You didn't mean to fall in love with her. She wasn't supposed to fall in love with you, either. But you both did, anyway.
-Addison Forbes Montgomery, for Meredith Grey
MerAdd. Meddison. F/F. Meredith Grey/Addison Montgomery. Rated E for Explicit. Grey's Anatomy & Private Practice Crossover.
CW: Domestic Violence. Unhealthy Relationships - Physically & Emotionally Abusive Addek & MerDer. Also briefly okay (non-abusive), Maddison & Mark/Derek.
*This story is entirely fictional. Please seek professional help for abusive relationships in yourself and others. Take all abuse seriously.*
Chapter 3: ANNIVERSARIES
Derek was allowed to miss anniversaries, but you weren't allowed without being yelled at. You're not sure how this makes sense, seeing as he has to remember them to tell you he's sorry in the damn first place. If he knows that he's wrong why doesn't he just celebrate it?
You get married and it's romantic and Mark is there saying it's wonderful.
He's happy for you and he thinks you'll last forever.
He loves you both, as a friend.
Mark loves you both...
Mark is off getting laid, though, you think during part of the party.
Even your mother and father are here, and Derek works his charm on them and he won them over.
Susan Grant doesn't like Derek one little bit. She's at your wedding at your request and she pulls you aside and tells you he is a heartbreaker.
This is the first time you've ever disagreed with your former nanny.
Years later, you'd have wished you'd tried harder to listen to her. She was a better parent to you than anyone else, after all...
You hang out with Derek's sisters while he is off hanging out with Mark.
The moment he comes into eyesight though you rush over to join him because you know he gets especially upset when you talk with Amelia.
He checks your phone for text messages sometimes so you always delete ones from her.
It's a bit creepy the way he wants to know the code for your phone, but maybe that's not unusual. You've never dated anyone else before other than Skippy Gold, so you're not really sure, and you have no one to ask about it, because you won't ask Sam or Naomi because they would probably tell Derek you asked that.
You spend your first year anniversary at the CN tower because he wants to take you abroad and that ends up being Canada.
He jokes about wanting to kidnap you away from the world. You laugh it off.
You didn't know that he could take it almost so seriously.
By now you've had sex in so many places and you've gotten so good at it.
He's always on top of you, and you don't seem to mind.
He says he doesn't do it without being on top.
You ask him if he'd do it for you for your birthday.
He says no.
You never ask him ever again.
Your second anniversary you spend at work because he has surgery and so do you. You're still in medical school so being able to be on a surgical rotation is so special you don't want to miss it.
He still sneaks you away into a supply closed and fucks you rough up on the door.
You're pretty sure that people could hear you screaming if he hadn't gagged you with his entire hand.
You learn later, rather than sooner, just how effective he is at making sure you stay quiet.
You tell him a quickie is a perfectly good present for an anniversary.
He doesn't say it back to you. You know he wants more than that from you. He's entitled to it, almost.
He is because you let him be entitled to it.
You shower him with presents such as chocolates and books because you know that he likes them.
You don't buy him music because he doesn't like what you like and you only pretend to like what he likes.
He says thank you and he screws you all evening.
Years later, you would remember this as your last 'good' anniversary with Derek Shepherd.
Your third anniversary he yelled at you more than he talked to you. By now you're fighting almost every day and sometimes you just need a break from him.
You lie and say you have a patient at the hospital so you can sleep over somewhere other than his bed.
You lock the door and pray that no one will find out that you're not at home with him.
You say you love him, he takes an hour to say it back. You take it anyway because you know he still loves you. Right?
Your fourth anniversary he spends the evening kicking the wall. By now you're both about to graduate from medical school and you're about to be matched for surgical placements.
You wanted to apply everywhere but he says if you love him you'll only put down the same exact choices as him. You do. And you end up getting into the same hospital, and still in New York.
Would things have been better if you'd got placed somewhere else?
Your fifth anniversary he spends kicking your shoes. He says he hates how they clog up the porch even though you put them in a neat line. You try to tell him not to because you love your shoes and they are expensive.
Derek keeps kicking, and you almost want to start crying but you don't cry in front of people and you won't cry in front of Derek. So you just watch as thousands of dollars of your favorite shoes are decimated under your feet.
You should have taken that as a bad omen. You're a fucking doctor. You should have known...?
Your sixth anniversary he spends kicking junior interns around on his service. He's drunk off the power of being more than the bottom of the surgical 'food chain'. He's a resident still, as are you, but he makes people shiver and shake when they've done something wrong.
He makes you shiver and shake even when you've done nothing wrong.
You try to stand up for them but you get it all back tenfold later.
You hate yourself when you walk by without challenging him.
You hate yourself while he's berating you when you do.
You hate yourself more, lately, even more so than when you were younger.
You tell yourself it's normal to feel this way; everyone is stressed as a surgical resident, right?
It takes a very long time before you learn that life doesn't have to be this hard all the time.
Your seventh anniversary you hide in your bedroom as he pounds at the door. He calls you a 'whore,' again because you spend so much time with Mark and Sam and Naomi. He doesn't understand the concept of 'just friends,' very well, which you realize is a bit hypocritical seeing as they're his friends as well and he hangs out with them all the time.
You'll never point that out to him, though. Especially not while he's drinking scotch and rattling at your door frame. He's not an alcoholic, either, but the sound of the bottle slamming onto the table makes you wince in the same way it always did when your father downed his fifth drink of the evening.
As a teenager, you figured out that 'The Captain Montgomery,' yells louder even while he was slurring.
Derek does the very same thing, it's uncanny. He's pretty good at holding his liquor, though. He doesn't slur nearly as much as your daddy.
But he certainly sounds angrier than even your daddy was to your mother...
Your eighth anniversary you call your brother from your boss's office because you realize you have not talked to him in months and months.
You thank your boss profusely for letting you use his phone; you know that Derek tracks all your calls, and if he sees more than a few that are not to him he threatens to make your life miserable, and you don't want to find out what he has in mind by that.
You end up finding out some of that, anyway, soon enough...
Your boss gives you a pitying look when he says to 'take all the time that you need,' and he locks you into his office. You kind of like that your boss pities you because at least he cares enough about you to differentiate you from Derek.
Most people can hardly tell the difference anymore because you spend every waking minute together.
You're not sure if you're a different person from him anymore.
Your ninth anniversary he hits you for the first time. You're not even that surprised that it happened after all the punches he's thrown at the wall. This time the punch lands on your shoulder and it leaves a nasty bruise.
He grovels and tells you he's sorry and that he never meant to hit you and that it was an accident. He says he'll make it up to you, he says he'll kiss it better. He does, or he tries to and you let him have you. You want him, too. It's been long enough since you've been intimate and you've been feeling like you've been walking on eggshells.
That night, though, was like the beginning of the relationship the way you were breathing ragged and he was making you feel. You did it all evening again. You don't remember the last time you did it all night and all day.
You decide to forgive him for the punch because, as he said, he just missed, right?
Years later, you'll realize he did miss because he was aiming for your stomach because it would hurt more and it would be easier for you to hide.
Over the course of the next year, he physically escalates a variety of times. You've been together for nearly a decade now and you're used to being his metaphorical punching bag whenever something goes wrong.
Being the literal one only seems like a natural continuation of your bitter existence. You still don't cry. You don't make a sound. He covers your mouth in a gag the same way he did years ago while making love to you. Back then it was to contain your screams out in ecstasy. Nowadays it's to contain your screams of pain and fear.
You think sometimes it's not normal, but in a way, you think that it is.
Your father hit your mother. Your father hit you once, albeit by accident, with that piece of glass that gave you a weeklong vacation from elementary school.
Although, you wished every day you could get away from the house with all the fighting.
This time there's no one to keep you home because Derek knows that you'll hide the scratches all on your own.
You buy makeup in bulk and you only wear sweaters. Sometimes he misses and hits your forearm so you need to have something so people don't ask you questions.
You go through life as a shell of yourself. You're not sure who you were before him. You're not sure if there'll be a life 'after him,'.
He threatens to kill himself if you leave him.
You've seen how fast he drives.
You know he could not be kidding.
He tells you that he's trying to be a better man for you.
He tells you that you make him into a better person.
He tells you you're the only one who can love him...
And that he's the only one who could ever love you.
You start to slowly believe that last one. After all; who could love a girl covered in black and blue and yellow and purple and red marks, other than the person who gave them to you in the first place?
Your tenth anniversary you can hardly walk from the strike marks. You have bags under your eyes and you pray he never messes up your fingers because you still have to work in the morning. You wonder how his hands are not bruised from hitting you but then again, he's used to it by now.
He's been doing this for over a year, every day now. It used to be once in a while, then once a month, and then once a week, and now it's nearly every day, with twice a day sometimes to make up for a day he forgot all about you entirely.
You flinch when he walks in the door because you know what's coming to you.
You know he'll start harder and then go slower.
You know after he's burned himself out he might even give you sex because he feels bad, and he says he still loves you, and he waits until you say that you'll always love him back, too.
A very broken part of you probably always will, or at least, will always crave the adrenaline of the honeymoon good that always followed the bad.
Your eleventh anniversary he beat you until you couldn't stand up anymore.
You were already on your knees begging for him to stop it.
Usually, you took every lash but this time he beat you with a beer bottle.
You hadn't been hit by glass since your father cut you that one time when you stepped in the middle when he aimed at your mother.
It hurt much more this time because you knew it was directed only at you.
You know why he did it; you had forgotten this anniversary entirely.
You spaced through it because you can't sleep these days because you can't lie on your sides because of the scratches and you can't lie on your back because of the bite marks and you can't lie on your stomach because of the repeated punches right to your abdominals.
You don't know how you've kept this hidden for so long, but no one seems to be asking you any questions.
There's no one who cares about you around you.
You're still in New York but you're in a real 'Hampton's', which you call non-ironically because it's a prestigious property in New York.
You don't let your brother visit because you know Derek will yell. You don't call Naomi because Derek will throw out your phone. You don't call Mark or Sam because if you talk to a man that isn't him or at work he slams you against the floor and sticks his foot into your back.
You forget the long list of rules sometimes because he's making it up as he goes.
You're on the ground bleeding this time, the cuts opening and oozing red blood.
He says morbidly that your blood matches your hair. He says it looks pretty on you, coating your outsides as he offers you sex all inside you.
You still want him to fuck you; you need to feel that kind of release.
If he's never going to leave you, you want the bad love better than none, either way.
"Derek, please, please, fuck me," you say because you want him to, and you know he wants you to beg him.
You know he likes that, and a part of you likes that it turns him on and gets him going for you.
Derek drops to the floor right beside you. He kisses you roughly and he handles you tenderly.
He's warming you up until you're ready to go and he is as well. You beg him again to screw you. And Derek does.
This time he's fucking you on the floor because you don't think you can stand. You don't think you can come to your knees, either.
But his fingers are delicate now, and he's switching from smacking to suckling you.
And you're not sure how one man is capable of both of such things.
But he is. He always is. And he's Derek Christopher Shepherd.
He's your husband of over a decade.
You didn't know at the time that the eleventh anniversary would be your last with him. You never thought you'd ever have the courage to leave him. Maybe it won't stay, though. Because you see him again after you say 'goodbye,' but before you get a divorce. You know you have to see him again to get him to sign you the papers. You're not sure if you'll ever serve them to him, though. He knows and you know, that you just might come crawling back for even more.
***** END OF CHAPTER THREE
Author's Note:
Hope you liked these vignettes.
Somehow I'm really enjoying writing this story.
I never thought I would, but I do. Writing this angst is somehow cathartic...
More of this era of Addison's life might come back in flashbacks...?
I'm fighting a balance of wanting to express this story, but also wanting to move forward in time.
Let me know what you think of the pacing.
bobbiejelly
Dedications, May 30, 2020:
EVERYONE WHO READS CHAPTER 1 AND COMMENTS, LIKES, FAVORITES, FOLLOWS, ADDS TO READING LIST ETC.
Ao3:
AddisonAddek for the Comment, AddisonAddek, Hotgitay for the Kudos,
12 Hits.
Fanfiction:
62 Hits.
Wattpad:
arizonaslesbianism, for the comments and stars. JordynMarie05, addiesrep, danielaperezsurga, outlawqueenpercabeth, for the votes so far.
30 Reads, 8 Votes, 21 comments.
AND THANKS TO EVERYONE ELSE, WHO READS THIS, EVER!
Ps. New MerAdd fics are up or updated, recently:
Prom?
101 McDalmatians
Five Reasons We Knew Calzona Was Made For Each Other & Five + More 6 Sentence Fics
Move Over, Derek!
... And there will eventually, soon be new Chapters of these ones up:
Second Person (The Diary of Addison Montgomery) Falling Apart, Barely Breathing Soothe A Seattle Grace Mercy West Swingers Party - Post Plane Crash Edition Out Of The Dark
Feel free to check them out, hopefully after you leave a note, and have a great day!
bobbiejelly