I Tried To Hate You (But Somewhere Along The Line I Fell In Love)

Chapter 1

This was not how Meredith Grey's life was supposed to work out. She never really had a solid plan for her life after medical school besides starting her internship, but this? She certainly would not have planned this.

For the first time in a while, things had really started to look up for her. Sure things weren't perfect, she still hadn't properly spoken to her father in almost twenty years, her mother still had Alzheimer's and as a doctor, she was starting to worry about her liver with the amount of alcohol she had been putting into her body, but some things just couldn't be fixed. Or at least she didn't have the money at the moment to pay a good enough therapist to fix them.

Despite all that, things were finally going well. She had moved back into the house in Seattle that she had lived in as a child, the place that still held all her mother's old medical tapes and things from her childhood. There were still some bad memories that lingered around the house for Meredith but in the end, it was home. It felt less empty now with George and Izzy living there too. At first, she had hated the idea of having roommates but she had caved when she realised she wouldn't be able to afford rent without them. As it turned out they were good company and as a bonus point Izzy was a great baker and there was almost always freshly baked goods in the house.

She was a surgical intern in a programme that was praised as one of the best in the country. In the same programme and hospital that her mother had done her internship at. The same place that her mother had learned, grown and thrived in as a young female surgeon.

She had him. The Guy From The Bar, McDreamy, Her Knight In Shining Whatever, Derek Shepherd. She was in love and in what was turning out to be a steady relationship for the first time in a long time. She was happy with him, and hell she had even adopted a freaking dog.

Everything had started to come down around her when she showed up in Seattle for the first time. The She-Shepherd, Satan, The Adulterous Bitch, Addison Montgomery. Whatever you wanted to call her, she was his fucking wife. Derek was married. Everything about this perfect relationship she had was built on a lie and it had turned to chaos. She felt like she had been thrown into freezing water and she didn't know how to deal with any of it.

Maybe she wouldn't have cared so much if Addison had just come to Seattle to win Derek back, to take him home to New York with her, sure it would have hurt but she would have drowned her pain in tequila and boys and gotten over it eventually. No, what bothered Meredith the most was that Addison was tall, glamorous, just all around beautiful and showed no signs of actually leaving Seattle as long as she had a chance of fixing her marriage with Derek.

It would have helped if she had hated Addison - and she really had tried to - but Meredith found her actually easy to work with and Addison didn't seem to hate her despite the fact that she had been sleeping with her husband. Or was it ex-husband? There had been some talk thrown around about divorce papers but Meredith wasn't sure if that was just Derek's attempt to get her back because it didn't seem like anything had been signed. After all, Addison was still calling herself Montgomery-Shepherd and Meredith couldn't help but notice the wedding rings Addison still slipped back on her finger after scrubbing out of surgery. She couldn't help but notice the sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach every time she saw her wearing the rings either.

Every morning Meredith found herself standing in the locker room with her friends hoping that when Bailey showed up to give them their assignments she would tell her that Doctor Montgomery-Shepherd had once again requested her on her service. At this point, Meredith found her easier to work with than Derek who she still wasn't entirely on speaking terms with yet. Sometimes if she was put on Derek's service she would ask to be moved to Addison's. It had gotten to the point that her friends had started to pick up on it and Alex would make fun of her for working with "the vagina squad," the newest nickname on a long list of them that they had for OB/GYN. Bailey would reluctantly agree to move her, claiming that she had brought her sex life into the hospital and she had to deal with the fall out of that but she also wanted to avoid any further drama with her interns who seems prone to it.